Help with Message Board idea

sam69

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Hey folks,

I've been slaving over the creation of my own discussion board, and I have done pretty much all the basic functionalities but one...

How can I show the current users logged in?

A friend of mine tells me to use CRON... CRON Jobs... whatever you want to call them. But I believe there must be an easier way.

Any ideas to start me off with?

Thank you so much for your time! 🙂
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harmor

I guess you could make a new field on the "users" called, say, "logged" and make it an "int" and make the default "0"

When a person logs in have it change the value to "1" then just do a query where "logged = 1"

sam69

Right... I fumbled around that idea a little.... Here's what I was able to search on this site, and from some common knowledge:

a table called UserLogged...

Inside it will be fields:
ID (PK)
UserID (FK)
loggedIn enum('0','1')
loginTime (dateTime)

Every time a user successfully logs into the system, this table will be updated.

A CRON "Job" will then need to be run continuously, setting all the loggedIn values in the this accounts table to 0, and updating it with the current users logged in...

Can anyone point me to some good references on CRON... or perhaps some code and guidelines to get me started on this new land of programming?

mrbaseball34

No way of knowing when the user kills the session.

Roger_Ramjet

A lot of forums and boards use 'recent activity' to get a list of users. If someone has posted in the last 5 mins then they qualify as active and are listed. If you were logging all page requests then you could use a time scale on that instead of just postings and so get the 'lurkers' as well.