Update a site ?

[alisam]

hi everyone,

i wrote a little php script which show who is on my site. (everyone has too log in and so the script knows what the users name is).

But i have the problem that the users status is online until he presses logout. if he does that everything is fine and the user is no longer shown as a online person.
But if someone just closes his browser window without pressing log-off the status is still online altought he is not really at this site any longer.

how could i fix that problem ? Anyone an idea ?

thanks in advance

ali

ps: everthing runs over a MySql db.

[[deleted]]

When a user logs on, you store the date somewhere in the database.
When a user views a page, you update that date.
Every time you show how many users are 'online', you check those dates to see which of the users have not done anything on your site for X minutes, and you mark them as 'logged out'.

[alisam]

if i have a date eg:

September 16, 2001, 8:24 pm
and a second one is eg

September 16, 2001, 8:50 pm

how can i compare or say set status to offline after for instance 10 mins ?

regards

ali

[lawnmowerman]

Don't use human timestamps....use the time() function to return the timestamp in seconds since the Epoch.

If you want to test how long a client has been idle, compare the timestamp (in seconds) to the current time.

Each time the user views a new page on the site, store the current time:

$online_user[lastseen] = time();

Then, if you want to show people idle for more than 5 minutes:

if( time() - $online_user[lastseen] > 600 )
print $online_user[username] . " idle for more than 5 minutes<br>\n";

Of course, where you store your data (probably a database) is up to you 🙂

-Rich