First off, thanks for the module. Works very well but there is one thing that I would love to see. The file volume over time quickly becomes enormous. I am not certain why we have to hang onto the huge directory tree. This is especially true when a vast amount of the data placed there is duplicitous with the database. I actually just finished a module that I am using for chat, and notifications that is very similar to yours and I can see why you chose to use a file structure vs the database due to boot strapping done every time you query for the latest updates when using the database. It seems that the perfect solution is a TEMPORARY file structure that holds the data for a given amount of time and then destroys it. This is especially pertinent with chat. It's just not cool to keep records of all chat forever in my opinion. A perfect system would be to store the chat roll, or data role for as long as a jquery get might need it, and then burn it. This way, you have one dynamic text file, and not a huge directory structure that gets absolutely huge over time. I am currently struggling with this. My site is going to have chat, emotes, random messages etc and if I had 30-40 users all going at once the db query would get very loaded, but then also, using Live Update, in a matter of weeks the directory structure would become enormous.