how can i do a "live" counter?

shockoman

thay show how many people are in the site at the moment. (not something like java that realy change live)
I know that it is possible in asp with global.asa but i want to do it in php.
i guess it should increase the $count in 1 when someone enter the site, and decrease it after 1 min (for example)
But how do i do it?

yelvington

The question does not make sense unless you implement a registration/login/logout system for your site. Without that, HTTP has no concept of "in the site at the moment." It merely responds to individual page requests.

kparker

It would sure be nice to somehow get across to everyone who seems to think in BBS-mode what a disaster it would be performance-wise to our webservers if HTTP were based on a continuous tcp connection!

Anon

I have a vague idea how to do it looking at misc. scripts, but I'm not sure how they implemented it. Anyway, check out:
http://www.shacknews.com/online/

daarius

you need a table for this.

when a page is accessed by the user, you increment the value in the table. and on every increment you remove the values older than 1 min.

this way you can echo back the total number of values from the table, showing total number of visitors on your page. This is accurate to +- 1 minute.

yelvington

The logged-in counter is real. The lurker counter is bogus. I clicked on the link. Am I there, or not? Not, as it turns out, but because I clicked once, I'm counted as "online." If you invent a standard like that you can toss around any number you want.

The point is that there is NO WAY to know whether someone is really "on" a Web site. All you know for certain is that they requested a page. All else is guesswork.

Here's how to implement the guesswork, if you regard guesswork as good enough:

Give unlogged visitors a session cookie. When you do, record that event with a timestamp.
For a cookied request, refresh the record.
To compute the number of anonymous users online, count the number of records where the timestamp is no older than N seconds, where you invent N.

Anon

I see what your sayin' 🙂 Makes sense. The closest you can come "real" with the guesswork is if you do as you say. Start a session based on an IP Address that is given for N seconds. As they click through the pages, update the timestamp, which in turn updates the expiration. Anyway, in the end I see what you mean. Take care.

./brm