I am using a free webhost and don't know if they have cron on it, is there a code to check it or should I just go to help and support?

Its best to check with help and support.

Yes! It is available. I never noticed it before -_-

I don't know how to use it, is it possible for you to help me out a bit? Please and thank you.

EDIT:
Do I just run the code that was previously posted? I am guessing so...right?

-Toxikr3

If your host has cpanel, you can do it from there easily.

Otherwise, check out some of the sites listed in the search.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=cront...fp=Xmf0jJ9P_V0

Yes, it has a cpanel, it only asks me to put the file name to run, and when to run it. Its quite simple, but I don't know if I need to run the code posted or a new code. Will the code know which user to put in the variable $userfinal? I don't know if it will work...

-Toxikr3

You will have to modify the code and maybe your database.

Pretty much you will need to use humbugs' solution.

In the cron file you will need to select all users that have not been active for lets say 10 minutes. Then run an update query for each user returned to set their status to 'offline'.

Alright, I will try that, thank you.
-Toxikr3

Sorry for not getting back to you about my idea. What I meant was, you store the timestamp for each user's last activity in the database. Then any time you want to check if someone is "active" you grab the timestamp and make the comparison.

You can also get a list of "active" user by doing (psuedocode) "SELECT * FROM user_activity WHERE timestamp>TIME()-60*5"

All you need to do for this is update the user's "last activity" timestamp every time they request a page, and you'll be laughing.

If you want it to be more accurate you can use AJAX to send a request to the server every 4 mins to tell the server that the user still has the webpage open in his/her browser.

Hope that helped. (I'm not saying the other way won't work either..)

Thanks! I was wondering about the comparison code
-Toxikr3

For each user you want to check, you would do something like this:
1. Get the timestamp for this user from the database
SELECT last_activity FROM user_activity WHERE id=$id 2. Compare this value with the timestamp for 5 mins ago within PHP
if ($last_activity > $now-60*5) { echo "online" }
I couldn't be bothered looking up the PHP code for getting timestamps, or translating to and from MySQL timestamps, but you can do that