New PM Notifier (Suggestion)

[thy secret]

Being the curious person that I am, I decided to have a look at the Automatic PM notifier you have on this site.

Essentually, you're calling an Ajax request to a page, that outputs a page, depending whether or not you have a private message.
The thing is, the page your outputting is being called every 6 seconds, per tab that's open. When there's no new PM, it's not very much data being sent, and it's only taking about 100 ms to process whether or not you have a new PM... Though, at the same time, you're having the server send a table that's projected onto someone's screen, when you have a new message, which means more data to process, and a longer page being loaded... And not just that. The page is being loaded again and again, every 6 seconds.

I have a suggestion for this...

Instead of sending the entire div and image as a response to the Ajax request, how about instead, just sending a number? The number of PMs unread (or a blank page for 0), and then having the client build the table up.
You can have the template of the PM table, either as a Javascript variable, or maybe something like

<script type="text/template" id="PMTemplate">
<!--
You have %NUM% new PMs!
//-->
</script>

Only with the whole table and everything. Like this, it'll be invisible to everyone, (and it's not even being processed) and it's NOT being called every 6 seconds...

In this way, the ajaxpmnotice function will look more like...

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function ajaxpmnotice()
{
	new Ajax.Request
	(
		'http://bluemoonroleplaying.com/forums/pm.php',
		{
			method:'get',onComplete:function(request)
			{
				if(request.respons != "")
				{
					var Output = replace(/^<!--(.*)//-->$/,"$1"$('PMTemplate').innerHTML); //Strip out the Comments
					Output = replace("%NUM%",request.response,Output);//Input the number
					$('ajaxpmnotice').innerHTML=Output;
				}
				else //0, or no response text at all...
				{
				$('ajaxpmnotice').innerHTML="";
				}
			}
		}
	);
}
ajaxpmnotice();
setInterval("ajaxpmnotice()",6000);
// -->
</script>

Of you could also have all the text part be parsed, as %TEXT%, and have it so if you have only 1 new PM, it says "You have a new PM",


Of course, the part about the output isn't the exact look. I was just giving an idea.
PS, You never adapted the CSS styling for the Code tag xD It's basically grey/white text on a white background. I had to make the text red to be readable.