I am trying to make a chat room to my web page. and I want my users to know if the person they are trying to reach is afk/online/offline. i have looked around and found an answer on how to auto log out php sessions after a certain time. then you would have to add a timestamp when logged in an check if the time has passed the log out time if not you will have to update the time. so for my chat room i figured that I should add a time stamp when they logged on to the site in mysql. but then I would have to update this on every page. then the chat room would get all online users and check if the time stamp is less than 5 minutes ago. to avoid having the page use a long time loading the script i wanted to add this function in php at the bottom off the page where it update the time_stamp in the database every time the page is loaded.
so before I go on making this code I was wondering if this is a smart solution or if there is an easier way. I know i could make a javascript on the user and check if it should change the status but this would not work if the user has disabled javascript on my page.
so should I make my chat room user status like this or is there another better/smarter solution?
That solution is Ok. It it just one query to your Database. And it makes no differents if the query is on "the bottom", because the php script runs completly through your script and after that it sends the content to the user.