With regard to the IP checking mechanism. Realize that this reduces the count for machines behind a masquerading firewall and increases the count for machines on dynamic IP dialup accounts. If anyone is interested in using this counter but wants to prevent a given IP from incrementing the counter a second time under any circumstances, it should not be too hard to modify the code to store the IPs in an SQL table as (I think) Slashdot does. I have no need for this, and don't intend to code it, but the code, being Python, is, I think, clear enough to modify. Howard C. Shaw III Programmer/SysAdmin St. Thomas High School