Anyone knows of any service or how to track if a user is online.. For example... a visitor visits my site and able to see if I am online or offline.. Just like the MSN messenger, ICQ messenger or any messengers... But this is on my site ...

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Yo,

I'm pretty sure it's VERY possible, but it would involve extensive PHP usage, checking your IP address, if it equals your real IP address then it stores it as a variable. It should constantly check the visitor's IP and preform that same action, EVERY time someone views your site. This is sone kinda extensive stuff for me, someone who has just medium experience in PHP. This would be ALOT easier if you had a login system installed, and you could just check yur server to see if 'Inspiron' is logged in, and return a variable.

Panda

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The easiest way to do it would be to have a script that is called every time the page is accessed which adds the visitor to a list of active users in a MySQL database (or a table within a database; you don't need to use a whole database), along with a timestamp. The timestamp is reset every time the user re-accesses a page that in which the script is implemented, and all users who have been inactive for, say, ten minutes are automatically removed from the list, as it is assumed they have left. This is similar to how the IPB active user list works.

Here's an example written on the fly - so it's untested and only theoretical based on my knowledge:


The table structure should be something to the equivalent of:


You could obviously store other data if you wanted, but this is just the bare basics. It does, however, present at least one problem - and that is if more than one user accesses the site from the same IP address, eg. they are on a LAN sharing the one Internet connection, it will only count the one visitor. But that shouldn't be much of a problem, and isn't signifant enough to worry about.

To retrieve the number of active visitors, try:


You could also display their IPs if you wish, but that isn't a very good idea - it tends to freak paranoid people out, and could cause all sorts of other problems.

Oh, and this assumes you don't have some kind of member system set up. This only logs/displays people active on your site.

 

 

 

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Oh, the first line was supposed to be '// Assumes you are already connected to your MySQL server, and have selected the database'. Where's the damn Edit button when you need it?

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