thanks for the reply. That's not going to work in this case. I need one forum that issues e-mails in more or less real time while the regular forums e-mail nightly (if a user is subscribed).

the idea is if there's a time dependent posting...."everyone who's interested, pub crawl tonight"....that message needs to go out now....while regular postings that aren't time sensitive can be sent via regular subscribe/cron at 4am..