All "e-verbal abuse" aside :P, when you use it like .+, the regex will match as one many as it can, but when you add a ? after the + , it'll stop any further match. In other words, It forces a non-greedy scan within the regex engine. Let's conduct a simple test here:

alias test {
  if ($regex(Dean has made 56 posts thus far!,/(dean.+)/i)) echo -a $regml(1)
}

This will return the exact sentence "Dean has made 56 posts thus far!"

Now let's place the question mark next to the plus sign:

alias test {
if ($regex(Dean has made 56 posts thus far!,/(dean.+?)/i)) echo -a $regml(1)
}This will only return "Dean"

Please note that the question mark also has another meaning to mean optional in regex.

As for the aforementioned mIRC socket methods, the POST method is almost similar to the GET method. The only difference is that the info isn't fetched in the URL itself, but instead is sent at the end of your requests. Depending on a website, some websites only require the POST, which often happen to user log-in, and some support both GET and POST.