Question

When users login their online status is set to 1 when they logout its set back to 0, im trying to make it so after a certain amount of time of inactivity on the site they will be sent to logout.php, so I setup a field in my users table as last_activity as a timestamp. and have this code as a include on each page.

<?php
if (!isset($_SESSION['last_activity'])) {
    // initiate value
    $_SESSION['last_activity'] = time();
}
if (time() - $_SESSION['last_activity'] > 500) {
    // last activity is longer then certain amount of time
    header('Location: logout.php');
} else {
    // update last activity timestamp
    $_SESSION['last_activity'] = time();
}
?>

But right now as I have it, the last_activity field only updates when something on the users account is updated, also after the certain amount of time the user isn’t logged out and I don’t know why.

Answer 1

From automatic logout after 15 minutes of inactivity:

<?php
session_start();
$timeout = 10; // Set timeout minutes
$logout_redirect_url = "index.php"; // Set logout URL

$timeout = $timeout * 60; // Converts minutes to seconds
if (isset($_SESSION['start_time'])) {
    $elapsed_time = time() - $_SESSION['start_time'];
    if ($elapsed_time >= $timeout) {
        session_destroy();
        header("Location: $logout_redirect_url");
    }
}
$_SESSION['start_time'] = time();
?>