in reply to Users who don't log out

People who don't think this is a problem must be those people who never look at other users. For the people that do care, these permanent residents do diminish its value.

The proposed solutions so far, seem are a bit extreme to me:

  1. Logging in as an XML ticker makes you completely invisible, for whatever you do, be it surfing on the site or talking on the chatterbox. It is behaving less than ideal.
  2. Making a special nodetype for the fullpage chat frame pages, as castaway proposes, would behave perfectly, but it seems like a lot of work to me. So I think it won't happen.
The solution I'd like to propose appears to be less intrusive, but I don't know how hard it actually is to implement, as I'm not a pmdevil. It is that a special parameter could be added, "autoreload" (or maybe something with a little bit of a shorter name), which would have to be recognized by the site, and which would make a page fetch, for any page, appear to be anonymous.

If you then add this parameter to the URL for the refresh for the pages in Fullpage Chat, then these pages fetches that are automatically done by the browser, would be ignored for other users, while manually loaded pages, would be visible. It seems perfect.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Users who don't log out
by castaway (Parson) on Mar 13, 2004 at 14:32 UTC
    I have to admit, I rarely, if ever, look at Other Users. I wait for people to say something to me, or in the CB, before I assume they're there. (Possibly because of the MUDding background, where its also quite likely that half the 'who' list is actually gone to bed.. Especially in these days of cheap 24-hour internet connections..)

    Anyfish, I think you mis-read my idea a little. The special nodetype would be for the xml-ticker nodes, the using of which could then be ignored (ie 'lasttime' wouldnt be set for users getting nodes of that type.) I dont think it would be all that difficult, either.

    Fullpage chat, on the other hand, could just use the current way of being invisible, which is the logging on as an XML ticker thing, that you pointed to. *Just* for the purpose of getting the 3 frames it has /msgs, cb and other users. (Set up a second cookie for it, or something)

    Specifically, logging on as an XML ticker sets a slightly different cookie. Clever clients, which hold the cookie in memory, could easily swap cookies to do one thing, and back to do another. They could just as easily not use a cookie at all, to fetch things like Other Users, CB, newest nodes etc, that don't need a login. The question is, can we persuade them to, its a social engineering thing.

    If FPC gets fixed, theres still the 'other clients' ..

    C.

[reply]

In Section Perl Monks Discussion