Chat Room

Anon

hi,
I am going to write a chatroom and I just wanna ask a question.
How can I know that the user is still in the chatroom or has already left the chatroom by just closing the browser?
In other words, in what way I can detect that the user is still connecting to the chatroom??
thx...

phpfreak

Hi There,

I've had this problem too.
What I did was creating a session for every user and save the session_id in a database.
Then I checked every 5 minutes if the session was still existing. If not? The user left! Simple isn't it?

Good luck!

Greetz,
Daniel

trippyd

unfortunately, to do that you need to use some sort of client side technology (javascript, java, etc.) to constantly converse with your server. HTTP is, unfortunately, not able to tell when someone closes a browser.

phpfreak

Yes that's right... HTTP is not able to do that. But with sessions it's not a problem.

A session will be destroyed as soon the user closes the browser. So it is possible, but it's a little bit more work.

Greetz,
Daniel

trippyd

Actually, a session isn't destroyed by the client closing their browser (closing their browser, all windows of their browser, will remove the session cookie though), it is destroyed either explicitly (session_destroy()) or by timing out. You cannot detect, except by the server timing a session out, that a user has closed the browser. However, if you use your method, and the user sits and "lurks" for five minutes, the server will think they have left.

Anon

The most effective way (IMO) is too make a javascript event that execs an action when the user closes the browser by using event handlers. For example, when the user closes browser, the javascript does <a href="chat.php?exit=true"> and the php script interprets that as "The user left" and broadcasts the fact to the other chatters.

Anon

Is it possible then to make that work sort of the other way, and have some way of checking to see if the chat has been added to and then refresh it if so, otherwise don't?

Thanks
Rich.