I am planning on having an IRC (chat) daemon running on my webserver, which can be configured to restrict access to users based on usernames/passwords contained in a SQL database. My programmer advises me that he can set things up so that the chat system will look directly at the amember database, but ideally I think access to my chat system should look at a database created specifically for it, via an amember plug-in/extension. I'm wondering if we could just create a blank database, tell amember to use some existing plugin to talk to it, and then custom code the chat system to access this new database according to whatever structure it happens to have. In other words, is custom coding a new plug-in really necessary for such a simple process? And if not, which existing plug-in might be best suited to this purpose? Any thoughts anyone can share on this idea be greatly appreciated.