Who is on in Real Time?

Is it possible?

[txbakers]

Of course it's possible, I just don't know how yet.

With the live chat support programs, you can tell immediately when someone enters your site, what page they are on, where they came from, etc. in real time.

I would like to take it beyond that and query the server to find out who they are - what login they used, etc. How would we do that?

I can think of a long way to do it - on the login page write a record to the DB with their login, capture the time, date, etc. But that's not elegant. Does anyone have a solution in place already?

[Brett_Tabke]

Need some sort of session tracking.

The way I do it, is I have a session directory. The file name is that of the visitors IP address. Into that file goes the relevant log info (page, refer, time, cookie, etc).

From there, the world is your oyster. I use a cron job to delete stale sessions on a one hour interval.

The only real stopper are those on big proxy sites like aol.

[BlobFisk]

This is a little away from the main topic, and I apologise for that (mods: feel free to move this somewhere else!). But you've been mentioning recently, Brett, the restrictions and difficulties that AOL puts on a webmaster (here and in the thread in the Community Centre on threads maked members only).

We do a lot of development for companies in the States, but rarely deal with the tracking and logging side of things - but I'm very curions to know just how much of a burden dealing with/catering for AOL based users is? Do webmasters tend to tweak a lot to cater for AOL? If so, what?