who's online

bryson

Sigh... i've been battling with this for a while. I used to display who's online by writing the users name to the DB at logon and deleting it on log off. User's often just close the brower instead of using the log off button. The only way to execute more code if someone closes the browser is to use onunload to spawn another window. A lot of people have pop-up blockers now too, so that doesn't always work. If the browser crashes the onunload code won't execute either. You need to have a JS refresh every 5 seconds or so... which is kinda hack.

So then I tried using php sessions. Session info is stored in a cookie. So reading that is the same as reading from a DB. It's too bad all session variable's aren't stored in server memory or something... that would be cool.

I know the answer to this is to use php socket functionality... i guess I should get learning it!

bad76

Hi,
socket ? If you look around, you can read a writing like "user online last 5 minutes " in about all "who's online" pages. This because most people are using a timed way to do this:

When a user click on a link, this link is loaded into db and a timestamp updated. A dB like that:
ID - key field, not null, unique, autoinc
USERID - id of user who click on link
LASTPAGE - text of link of last visited page
LASTTIME - timestamp

When you ask for "who's online" you get the result of a query asking for all users where now()-timestamp is 5 minutes or less.

I hope this helps you

logand

You should take a look at this PHP class that can list all sessions on a WEBserver...
http://logand.users.phpclasses.org/browse.html/package/1354.html
Hope this helps.

bryson

thanks dude