-boRg- wrote:
There is no acurate way of detecting users, session ID's and cookies are useless if people have cookies disabled so the best way is to use IP addresses, it's very rare that mutiple users will access your site at the same time with the same IP address and AOL users tend to change IP addresses every few minutes. |
You actually have a very accurate way of tracking logged in users. Since the server recognizes each logged in user, it should be easy to track who is active. Unless, of course, you are not passing the login name with every page request. In that case, passing that variable and counting who retreived a page within the last x minutes would provide a very accurate way of counting.
You would still have to resort to using IP addresses for guests, but you could use username to track logged in users instead of IP, which makes more sense and would be more accurate.
I think this is the method many other forums use to determine who is active on the forum.