How-to Subscribe to thread?

[Anon]

Hi there,

I've developed a forum and made subscription available on it .. it colects info of what and when subscirbed to a specific thread - but how-to send out messages to those who subscribed?
if I will just do it in script where insert message query is using mail() - its gonna take forever for user .. he'll have to wait for all messages to be sent out .. and only after the page will open.

well my question is:
how-to make this subscription work? do i need to set up any background processes like run some script every 5-10 minutes ? if yes how to do that?

thanks a lot.

[zalath]

It's simple, actually. You store the user name and the thread they're subscribed to somewhere. Let's suppose it's a database.
Now, when someone <b>posts a new message</b> to any given thread, your code would have to look up from the db everyone who has subscribed and mail the new message to them - the time consumng part would come with the posting. Which is what people are used to, and besides, it doesn't take all that much time.