I have put together a forum for a customer - or am trying to. its not very sophisticated quite simple but i have some queries related to what i have seen here.

At the moment on my forum if you click top post a message it checks if you are logged in by looking for a cookie that is created when you log in. that cookie expires when your session ends. not that i pretend to understand how it knows that but hey.

if you stay inactive for a while it has the same effect as logging you out.

Can i check to see how many users are logged in? & which users are logged in?? how do i do that? i can't work out how i would work that out unless as well as creating a cookie it creates an entry in a text file which i can read back out of & when they log out or expire then i destroy that entry. ??? how do i achive that?? does it have to be a text file can it be a table in access???

advice or feedback appreciated.

also i have all this user info that is in a different table to my forum info & i want to display some of it when a user posts a message like their location & name etc. should i write these into a cookie & retrieve from there or can i retrieve & write from two recordsets at the same time ??

again help, feedback appreciated

tonya

I also have a dilemma.

whats the best way to manage this. on the messages forum when you go there are login, subscibe etc buttons but i want them to check if user is logged in first. should i have one check & if user is registered then they get to do all other stuff & they are redirected to messages page 4 logged in users etc

or

should i have same message page with different checks depending on what user wants because thats turning out to be very messy.

advice appreciated & if u want to see what i am working on - its http://www.bits.co.uk

small family business.

I cannot say that there is a simple solution since so much of this depends on how you are setting up your database and things. If you want to know a simple and powerful method for managing users then I would look at these articles/tutorials:
http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/PHP/patUser

It may seem like a lot of work to do for such a simple task but it is for sure the easiest way that I have seen!
-dk

But.... i am not familiar with PHP at all. I am microsoft based & do ASP though thinking i should take PHP on board. There must be a way of doing all that stuff in ASP since in essence it has the same principal & theory behind it - i just need to find the solution .....

I need a drink !!

Ahh I see. Hmmm well I have to admin I used to use only ASP but never saw an API or set of functions specifically for users. Hopefully you won't have to write your own because I noticed many functions that have to be hand-coded where in php they are built in.
Good luck!
-dk