How Many Viewers?

edraynham

I want to work out how many people are currently viewing a page...

Can it be done?

If so, can someone point me in the right direction!

Cheers

Anon

This is a frequently asked question.

The correct answer is "no," because there is not a way for you to tell how long a user stares at your page. You can not know when someone leaves your site or closes the browser.

You can, however, estimate the number of unique users who have looked at your page, or site, within any slice of time by assigning unique IDs (perhaps sequential) as cookie values.

Of course, this raises the issue of tracking paranoid users who have disabled cookies.

edraynham

Thanks

amcgrath

Well, technically you kinda could, but I'm not sure how accurate it would be:

Set up the page as frames (2 frames, top takes 100% of window, bottom takes 0% (trust me)). The 0% frame's source could be an script set to refresh on a timed basis (meta-refresh) say every 10 seconds or so passing some unique user_id that you ingeniously put on it, and, upon receivng this ID, stores it into a database table.

Now, if you wanted to see who was viewing this page, a query to this table would include records where the view_date is within 10 secs of the query date.

when the user breaks outta the page(leaves the framed document) voila!

Kinda dorky and stupid, but I think it work (God only knows why you want to know this).

[deleted]

The easy method is to just make every hit on the server update the user's sessionid in a database table. Whenever you want to view the number, you first eliminate all the records that are older than X minutes, and the rest is the current number of viewers.

But like you said; that information is completely useless, un-interesting and most boring that I can think of.

The hitcounters are bad, but this is even worse.

edraynham

I was just interest! I saw:

"There are currently 6 people viewing the site. "

on http://www.chillcam.com and wondered how they did it!

amcgrath

I agree, I wouldn't even consider doing this at all (not mention the load it would generate) I more had fun writing it than anything (Now watch half of geocities is gonna read this and the next thing ya know, I've created a f--ing stupid fad... like <blink> but worse LOL

Anon

I saw:
   "There are currently 6 people viewing the site. "
on http://www.chillcam.com and wondered how they did it!

Hmm, whenever I see something like this, I wonder why they did it! I can't think of a single web site I've ever looked at where it mattered to me approximately how many people might have recently loaded that page.