CGI Cookies

The_Nerd · 05-29-2004, 05:27 PM

I need help with cookies. I am writing a forum, and I can't find any useful cookie tutorials on-line (all Perl) and I am not sure I even want to use cookies. You see, I want to know when a user enters or leaves the site, knowing when he enters isn't that hard, but how do I tell when he leaves??? I want this so I can say, %d users currently browsing this forum... and also for other resons. So basically, I want the cookie to store only the users name, and maybe one or two more values, then I want to somehow be notified when the user leaves the forum, or site. I am writing my forum in C, I know Python, and HTML (not very good at html though). I know nothing of Java-script, or any imbeded langauge like that. What do I do?

Please Help!!!

david_ross · 05-30-2004, 09:07 AM

It isn't very easy to determine the time that a user leaves the site. On most forums the correct label should be "users active over the last 5 minutes". For members that are logged in this is fairly easy to track and you could do it without cookies but for anonymous browsers you really need to use cookies or their IP. Both of these have drawbacks, such as some people disable cookies or you could have multiples users behind the one firewall that all identify from one IP address.

There are several ways to create cookies but since CGI.pm is probable the most popular here is a simple explanation:
http://perl.about.com/cs/intermediat...a/022504_p.htm

The_Nerd · 05-31-2004, 11:00 AM

Thank you. I was already planning on a timeout. I was just hopping that if I could catch them leaving, then I could just log them off that way. Anyhow, I think my answer is:

<body onLoad="" onUnLoad="">

Thanks!