It sounds like you want to see who is still active on the site. A piece of the solution could be tracking when people leave the site via an outbound link. You can track people leaving via an outbound link by rewriting every link off the site: replace
     <a href="http://www.yahoo.com">
with a
     <a href="/cgi-bin/sendto.pl?id=4041">
sort of thing, where 4041 maps to Yahoo. Then the sendto script can log the user, the time, and where they departed to. (This strategy is how the portals -- MSN, AOL, etc -- track the traffic they send to their advertising sites.) You could do these rewrites statically (embed sendto links in your static or dynamic pages), or I suppose you could do them on-the-fly with a mod-perl filter.

If the person leaves your site by just turning off their computer, by typing a new URL into the browser, or using their favorites, you wont be able to see it with this approach. So this doesn't completely solve your "who is still active" question, but I thought I'd toss out the idea.

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