How to know when a member stops viewing site?

PHPdev

I have a site setup that has a members only section. I know when a member starts looking at the site based on when they login. But what I need to determine is when a members stops viewing the site (within 1 min). Mainly by closing the browser and not clicking the logout link.

I was thinking of using the session identifier but is there anyway that PHP can determine if a session is dead? And how acurate is this?

Any thoughts on this issue are greatly appreciated.

Thanks

PHPdev 🙂

PHPThorsten

there is no really good working way to realise this.
the http protocol has no connection-controlling, so there is no way the webserver knows if the client is still on his page or not.

you have to write a little workaround like you say: hey, when my user has an idle-time of X minutes he isn't surfing on my page any more.
you may write a script which is called by every link the user can klick and which store's the last link-klick's timestamp of an user in the DB.
in another script you count how much timestamps < X minutes in your DB is stored, this is the number ob active users...

PHPdev

The only issue with that is that a person can take longer than 1 minute or even 5 to read some of the pages we have. So this method would not allow for tracking of usage down to 1min intervals.

Kind of interesting concept because we are looking to do what many Universites did during the Main Frame Era, charge for comptuer time used. We are just looking to charge by the amt of time they are on the site.

Thanks for the suggestion

PHPdev