how to detect online visitors and members??

[quecoder]

At any forum , you can see if a specific member is online or offline, or generally , how can I detect online visitors accurately who are visiting my website at the moment ...

Thanks in advance

[Atli]

That is typically done by logging the time when a given user (or a guest, if you want that) was last seen.
Once a user hasn't been seen for some predetermined amount of time, he is considered off line.

This is really the only reliable method, given the stateless nature of the web.

[samarudge]

Have a look at http://www.hscripts.com/scripts/php/usersOnline.php and play about with that code.
Regards,
Sam Rudge

[MVied]

Have a look at http://www.hscripts.com/scripts/php/usersOnline.php and play about with that code.
Regards,
Sam Rudge

This was actually the script I was going to suggest. You could implement it with your current system and possibly identify the IP addresses by the IP addresses your users logged in with. Just a thought.

[The-Marshal]

I think you can done this idea by session (for members)

like if session user is available so the user is here

IP address is unreliable.
DB sessions could be a way to go, although last_impression timestamp for logged on users can be used as a cut-down version. You need a clean up with these though (php script or MySQL trigger), unless you run a cron job every 20 minutes or so.