Here's a process (trivia being an easy example):

IRCUser gains a point to a score.
Bot adds this point to their score in a MySQL database. [don't know how this is possible, if possible at all]

User is in the top 10 for the 'game', and goes to the web site. The web site pulls off the top 10 scoring users from the MySQL database and displays.

I'd prefer for the updates to be real-time rather than batch processed at set intervals.

How possible is this? Do I need my irc shell to be in the same 'localhost' as my website in order to let them both have access to the database? If not, how fast, and indeed, secure, is it to keep one in one place, and another in another place?

(this is all in a PHP/MySQL directed environment)

Thanks for any help / guidance offered.

I have something like that implemented, although the bot is written in Python. The hi-score page is PHP/MySQL-based.

Since this environment isnt really suitable for detailed explanations, check #trivia on RouteNet (http://www.routenet.org).

Many of our customers have something similar to this running also. There is a stats bot in #sharpnet on EFNET too.

Check out a project on sourceforge called 'exordium'

It is IRC Services based on php with a mysql backend. It is actually quite good and has web interface modules.

Cheers