Sorry guys, I didn't mean that it can't be done literally, what I meant is that nobody likes a chat room where the page need to be refreshed when posting a message or when a user logs in/out. That's why I said "php only". In order to do a decent chat room you also need to make use of some javascript (ajax) and SQL. Obviously, there's more than php there. I, personally, would also use a Java server to do all the server-side work and let PHP handle the client part. Simply because it's more efficient than PHP when talking about sockets and streaming (see threads and buffering).

But, I guess I missed the point a little bit, because now I see that he wants to send messages to an IRC server rather than create a chat server.

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