number of users online

Anon

how can i know how many person in my site ?

egervari

the only way to do it is to have them log in and even that isn't too reliable because people can be logged in forever 😛 Basically the most effect way is this:

have people log in and store in the database that they are logged in
record the last time they accessed a page
regularly have a script clean up logged in accounts that haven't been accessed in awhile.

then you'll have a semi-accurate record-set in the database that will say who is logged in or not.

[deleted]

Please search the forum.

Many people have asked this question, and many answers have been posted.

[deleted]

Logging in is not required at all.

Search the forum for other methods.

egervari

well you could store the IP and things.. but that doesn't tell you much.

[deleted]

It doesn't tell you much, but you don't need to know much either.

The question was: "how can i know how many person in my site."

So all you need to know is how many different people are browsing the site.
PHP's session_id is unique for every user, so if you start a session on every page and store the sessionid in a database along with a date and update the date on every pageview, you can work out the number of concurrent users in one simple query.
If you combine that query with a query to remove all 'outdated' sessionids, then you don't need the crontab either.

mrjam

ken egervari wrote:

"but that doesn't tell you much."

Heh. No, was it supposed to?

// Thomasson

egervari

guess not, but that's how i usually implement it since i only care about users logged in on the sites that i do 🙂

Anon

Check out http://www.evilwalrus.com They have several scripts for counting online users. You`ll find this alot more informative and helpful than people like Vincent telling you to read a manual with no reference.

Laterz
Jules

[deleted]

If you are going to call names, at least get the facts right. I told him to search the forum, not read the manual.

mrjam

...and I belive I posted the ideas for the entire script... in the forum... when vincent then also helped the user by letting him/her know that a search on the forum would give results...

[deleted]

heck, I even posted an entire script once :-)

People just don't seem to understand that they can actually find these things out for themselves, and they can probably find the info in less time than it takes to post a question and wait for answers.

<rant>
PS. and I am still amazed at how many people do hours of work trying to get the current number of visitors on their website, even though it is the most useless piece of nonsense ever put on a page. Does anybody really care how many others are viewing the site? Did you ever look at that number and go 'wow!, only 2 people are viewing the site right now. cool'? Yes that is right, 2 people. The really busy sites don't show that kind of data, only the sites that are desperate for visitors have all those hitcounters and other sh*tty data that nobody cares about. There.
</rant>