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Is there a system that allows this functionality without much overhead?
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As you know such systems should be searched in the chat product's page as they are pluggins to chat software. IIRC there was such a pluggin for realchat but I doubt it is server friendly.
My suggestion would be not directly plug it into vb home page, instead tie it to a cron job to run say every 1 minute to compile a static page. Then vb forum home page can inherit this static page. This is in theory as I didnt apply such a solution before but I believe it should solve the server issue problems and is applicable.
That pluggin was not very crucial to us so we solved the issue within vb by the method you mentioned above. It allows us display users as "in chat room" until their vb cookie expires and it does not need any pluggin.