Who's online hack?

[-saturn-]

Hi!

Let me describe what I want to achieve.
I have a a link from inside my forum to a chatroom. There is a page, used as a portal, where people click on a link and the chat room loads in a new window.

People have complained that there are times that they click on the link, the java applet loads, they login just to find out that nobody's in the chat room. They asked of a way to verify if someone's already in there.

Since the chat is an external CGI script running on a different server, I know that you can't see who's using the script directly.

What I thought to approach the situation is this:

I'm thinking of a tracking system which logs which of the online forum members have clicked on the link that brings up the new window chat. Those members will be listed in the portal page so if someone goes there and see some people's names there's a good chance that these people are still inside. The names will be removed from the portal page as soon as the users have logged out.

I don't know how difficult this is to achieve (since I don't know any PHP) but my guess is that it requires the online tracking system built in vbulletin.

I think the general idea could be used for other applications too, so if anyone can think of something I'd like to know.

Thanks a lot in advance!