[Precaseptica]

Hey guys.

First thread from me. I normally crack my own issues, but this one I need a little help with.

I'm building a forum at the moment, and for this forum I require the well renowned function that allows people to see if a poster is online or offline.
How exactly do I work my way around this?

Will I have to create an extra table in my db, to store login sessions and handle the whole shabang this way, or is there a simpler way to do it?

Regards

[no2pencil]

I followed this tutorial as a guideline to setup the database columns & values to monitor usage by member & time. This will allow you to achieve what you are trying to do, but you will need to tinker with the code a bit as the main focus of the tutorial is something different.

[atik97]

You need to create a new column in your users table.

Then you need to put these code in every pages where the user has access in the forum.

session_start();
if(isset($_SESSION["userID"]))
{
	$setLogged=mysql_query("UPDATE users SET status='".time()."'WHERE user_id='".$_SESSION["userID"]."'")
	or die(mysql_error());
}

where the status field is updated with time() after checking the userID which need to be stored in a session variable.

Now you will have some code to display post, username of the author etc. To display the user online/offline status, add the following code in the scope where you are displaying each individual code-

$loggedTime=time()-120;	//2 minutes
if($row['status']>$loggedTime)
{
	echo "<img src='online.jpg'/>";
}
else
{
	echo "<img src='offline.jpg'/>";
}

where $row is returned from mysql query of users table and here a check is done to decide whether to display online/offline message.

Hope this will help you.

[CTphpnwb]

I would create a separate table containing two fields: the user id field and the datetime of their last activity. When ever a logged in user does anything, the datetime would be updated, but just before that I'd run a query to remove all records whose datetime is less than X minutes/seconds ago. Then it's just a matter of using a query to see who is online.

If you want to get fancy like this site, you could use a third field containing the forum where the activity is taking place.