How to handle user online status when he/she close the browser?

Question

I am having table to track user online status by setting 'is_online' field to 1. Now User get logged in the site and shut down his/her system or power down at that time he/she logged in. Here in database 'is_login' has the value '1' which means he is still using the site.

So I have to do some logic to change that value to '0'.

How can i handle this situation using PHP ?

Answer 1

The normal solution is to store a timestamp in the table which you update every time the user does something. Users with a recent timestamp (say, five minutes) are shown as logged in, everybody else are logged out.

It doesn't even have to be updated on every page load. Keep a timestamp in the session with the last update time as well, and only update the table when the database flag are about to expire.

Answer 2

Store an time-since-last-activity. When it's been longer then a specified time - treat as if offline. You should replace the is_online with an DateTime field, and update it every time the logged in user visits the website.

On the place you want to select all online users, instead of :

SELECT * FROM users WHERE is_online = 1

You could use:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE is_online >= DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 5 MINUTE)