Social Networking Sites Online Status

rbulph

OK, so it's green for 15 minutes after you refresh the page or navigate within the site. I didn't log out - I kept the page there, minimised.

If it's the same on facebook that means that if one of your friends is shown as online, and you try to chat to them, they may not see it if they have moved to another window.

Fun things to do on a Saturday night...

Godders

Within vBulletin the software puts you in the Who's Online table and lights your green lamp as soon as there is any activity by your account (ie - you login). It then assumes you remain online unless one of the following things happen -

a) You click logout - this sends a definate signal to the site you have left
b) You don't access any content for 15 minutes, this causes the software to assume you are no longer online.

This also means that even if you close your browser window the site has no way of knowing - it just waits 15 minutes and if your account doesn't have any activity it removes you from 'Who's Online'

In fact - the amount of time that it takes for your login to expire is set in the vbulletin admin panel under an option labelled session timeout -

Session Timeout

If a user is inactive for this number of seconds, then their forum session will expire.

If you use "Inactivity Based" read marking (see General Settings), then an expired session also means that all unread markers will be turned off for posts made before the session expired.

In any case, the user will be removed from the "Currently Active Users" list when their session expires.

I'm not sure if this is the same way that facebook does it though