Several opinions on this:
My first thought when reading was really 'who cares?'. I know there are several people here who think this is a 'bad thing', but there doesn't appear to be a site policy on it, and I'd rather there wasn't.

Having said that: My guess would be that most of the people on 24x7 are there because they didn't close their browser on Fullpage Chat, (and thus it's fetching /msgs periodically), or using some other form of client which doesn't log them out when idle. I know I'm guilty of both.

So I'll propose some solutions: The technical one would be to 'ignore' users just fetching xml-ticker nodes in 'Other Users' and it's cache. Or, mark them extra as being 'idle', which would mean 'not actively reading posts, writing posts, sending on the CB, etc'. This would mean having the xml-tickers have their own nodetype, probably, so it could be checked upon cookie verification (wherever the 'logged in' cache gets updated, I can't seem to find it). I know not all tickers require logins, but I'm guessing that some clients at least don't bother swapping out the cookie for non-cookie tickers, so a general solution is probably better. (And wouldn't hurt any)

There's also the 'social' solution, pointing fingers at people who are on lots, at clients which are 'broken'. I don't consider this a good solution, I'd rather some technical improvements on defining whos 'there' and who isn't.

Anyway, I will fix those of my clients that are fixable (the intermud gateway), the telnet one only shows people on when they send, anyway, and the fullpage chat emulation works as the normal FPC. (Auto-refresh of /msgs)

Update: Fixed im2-intermud gateway to stop fetching /msgs after an hour of not sending anything for a particular user. (Note: no affect on the telnet interface).

C.

In reply to Re: Users who don't log out by castaway
in thread Users who don't log out by diotalevi

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