Alright now that that's done we need to create some code to display the messages and then a few security functions. To display the messages all we need to do is select the last few from the database (i usually go with 7), but whatever you want and then use some html to display them.

php:

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$sql = "SELECT username, message, date FROM shoutbox ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 0,7";
$result = mysql_fetch_assoc($result) or die(mysql_error());

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Ok so what exactly is this select statement doing? It's selecting the user info from the table shoutbox, ordering the select by the column date in descending order. More recent timestamps will have a greater value than older ones. Finally, it is limiting the results of the select to seven. Now to display this info:

php:

---

<table>
<tr>
<td width="100">Shoutbox</td>
</tr>
<?
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
    /*
    * format the date
    */
    $date = date("m-d-y h:i", $row['date']);
    
    /*
    * print out the info
    */
    print("<tr><td>".$row['message']."<br>
            Posted by ".$row['username']." on $date.</td></tr>");
}
?>
</table>

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Alright, now the main parts of the shoutbox are complete. We have code to display the messages and some code to insert a new message into the database. Next all we need to do is add in some security functionality to prevent someone from posting thousands of times in a row. This was the whole reason for adding their ip to the database.

php:

---

    /*
    * Select the post(s) of the user and check to make sure it has been 15
    * minutes since their last post.
    */
    $sql = "SELECT user_ip FROM shoutbox WHERE user_ip=".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']." AND date-$time >= 900";
    $result = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
    $num = mysql_num_rows($result);
    
    /*
    * insert their info into database using
    * $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] for their ip
    */
    if(!$num)
    {
        $sql = "INSERT INTO shoutbox(username, message, user_ip, date) VALUES(
            '".addslashes($username)."', '".addslashes($message)."',
            '".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."', '$time'";
        mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
    }
?>

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