Forum Moderators: coopster
I haven't done anything like this and I thought that once they login, I would store the date and time and when they logout, store the logout date and time. But if they just leave the site and not logout, then my idea wouldn't work.
If anyone could point me in the right direction about how to do this, I would greatly appreciate it.
You may want to have a closer look at PHP Sessions [php.net] and pay particular attention to the garbage collection process. You can use filesystem session management or you can control session management yourself using a database.
I have been searching for a session oriented way to solve this auto-logout problem for a while. I have not been able to figure it out using that session reference. Could you recommend any resources regarding "monitor their session"? I have found not much info on this topic.
I, too, am searching for a way to log users out if they have closed the browser or just left the room for 12 hours. I thought there must be a way to see which $_SESSION['unique_user_name'] variables are set on the system at any given time, but couldn't figure it out.
1) they suggested logging users off if they haven't "done anything" on the system for a while. But this sort of implies that we log every single user action in a database. I don't think that sounds good.
2) they also suggested using onunload() - a javascript function that get's called when a user closes the browser. Sounds great! But when I tried to implement some ajax logoff stuff onunload(), the browser window came back up after closing, ran the logoff script and then closed. That didn't work either. I can;t have the browser coming back after the user tries to close it.
is there a better way to do this?
people tell you to be careful to secure your sessions because they are hackable. So that implies that I should be able to hack my own sessions. Can I get a list of user names who have open sessions? There's all sorts of things I've read that imply that you could do this, but I can't find any actual descriptions of the process.
Thanks for your help!
Would it be possible to do what I am looking for with cookies?
In the scenario you mentioned, you will face the same challenge using cookies as you are facing with sessions.
I believe the key thing is to detect if there is no inactivity for a certain period of time, and then take the last time there was an activity as the log out time. To do that, you will need to update a table with the timestamp of the last activity. Run a function first thing on all the pages to capture the last time the person loaded any of the pages.
But perhaps, there might be a better solution too.
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
var session ="a session id"
var pval ="a 7 digit number"
-->
</script>
there isn't an external file, no function.
I thought of having each page use a time stamp and if that stamp but this site has hundreds of thousands log into it every day, wouldn't that be a tad taxing on the server?
