Showing &quot;Active people&quot;

Showing "Active people"

Anon

I was wondering how to make a script where it will simply display some text that says "$number active people" This will count the amount of people on the website, anyone can tell me some code on how to do this? Thanks.

Anon

The only way to do this is to log their IP, and the time/date of their visit, then remove all entries that are, say, 2 minutes old, and then display the number of users left. This is hte only method, and it isn't the most accurate way, but its the best you can get. I have written a script(well, more of a class, but oh well 😉 like this, and I am working on making a website for it (I'm probably 20% done).

The basic structure is:

User visists page:
if this user's ip is already in database, then update their visit time
else, create a new record

delete all entries older than 2 minutes

count number of entries left, and that is the number of "active" users

Anon

Is it possible to, when a user enters your site, their ip is logged, and then deleted upon exiting? And then you count all the IPs that are logged at that time? That would be more accurate. Im new to PHP, infact I just started reading the book today 🙂 Very fun!!

kparker

Is it possible to, when a user enters your site, their ip is logged,

It's possible, but it's not particularly meaningful, as there is not now (nor has there ever been) a one-to-one correspondence between ip addresses and users. There are (just approximately) a few zillion users hidden behind network-address-translating routers, just for one example.

and then deleted upon exiting?

This isn't even possible: http is stateless, so the only "exit" is by you deciding that if you haven't seen user X make another http request in a while, then user X is no longer "on" your site. ("User X" being subject to all the inaccuracies described above.)

So yes, you can derive a "number" representing the number of "users" on your site, and display it, and for some reason lots of people seem to want to do this. Making that number represent something meaningful?--ah, now there's the hard part. :-)

Anon

One option that would slow your scripts down and impose a load on your server is to start a session on the pages that times out within a given period. Then you would need to count the number of active sessions. This should tell you the number of active sessionson your system. Note however that active just means they visited the site at least once during the specified time period.

Anon

testing

Anon

hi guys, here is my solution for counting active users. of course it will be inacurate if multiple users come from one ip - for my purposes that is not an issue.

it is pretty simple - it logs every ip and the time of their last load. then to display active users it selects * where last load was within 5 mins.

and the source:
<?

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

class users
{
var $interval;

function users()
{
    $this->interval = 5; //minutes
    $this->page_load();
}

function page_load()
{
    global $link_id;
    global $REMOTE_ADDR;

    $sql = "SELECT user_ip
           FROM users
           WHERE user_ip='$REMOTE_ADDR'";
    $result = mysql_query($sql, $link_id);
    $num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);

    if($num_rows)
    {
        $sql = "UPDATE users SET time=NOW()
               WHERE user_ip='$REMOTE_ADDR'";
        $result = mysql_query($sql, $link_id);
    }
    else
    {
        $sql = "INSERT INTO users(user_ip, time)
               VALUES('$REMOTE_ADDR', NOW())";
        $result = mysql_query($sql, $link_id);
    }
}

function active_users()
{
    global $link_id;

    $sql = "SELECT count(user_ip) as num_users
           FROM users
           WHERE time > DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL $this->interval MINUTE)";
    $result = mysql_query($sql, $link_id);
    $record = mysql_fetch_object($result);
    return $record->num_users;
}

function total_users()
{
    global $link_id;

    $sql = "SELECT count(user_ip) as total_users
           FROM users";
    $result = mysql_query($sql, $link_id);
    $record = mysql_fetch_object($result);
    return $record->total_users;
}

}
?>

this assumes you have a db connection to $link_id established.
youll need to make a table named users with columns user_ip and time. good luck!

-paul
http://xhawk.net