Ah, thanks drathbun. Im new to this though so what im trying to do here is get the id from the php_forum table then that will give me the number to fit into the:
http://www.myforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=XXXX#XXXX
where XXXX is the reference to the topic and post?
Then ive got to somehow get the contents of that post and poster username etc.
As for the "Who is online" list, to display that externally I have to retrieve all the "session_user_id" then match the ids to the usernames?
If thats right, could anyone explain a bit more?