Thread

I’m struggling to understand how the last visit field for a member is updated. It seems that it very rarely updates for all users, even though they have definitely been visiting.

For example I’m logged in and browsing the site and control panel for more than 20 minutes, and the last visit still says 2011-05-16 03:02 PM.

Any ideas?

Hi Daniel,

last_activity is written in the db at the start of a session. It is then updated every 5 minutes by default which may explain the inconsistency in your testing

If the user has been inactive for longer than the session length EE will update their last_visit item so that it contains the last_activity date.  That way, EE can show the exact time they were last visiting the site.

The default user session length is 2 hours and the default control panel session length is 1 hour

Take a look in system/codeigniter/system/libraries/Session.php for more on this

Does that help?

Thanks John - I saw that reply on another thread, but doesn’t quite explain why after 20 minutes of using EE, the last visit date isn’t updated? I.e. I would have thought after 5 minutes, the time and date would have updated?

Daniel,

What version and build of EE are you using?
Are you using cookies, sessions or both for the control panel user?

Build - 20101018, version 1.7.0

Settings - https://skitch.com/dajaniel/fyjn4/colorsnapper

Do these needs to be set to session?

Daniel, are you visiting the front end or the back end and expecting to see a change?

Both. I would have thought the time would update either with either a front end or back end visit.

Hi, Daniel. Using this code snippet, I get the following results:

Current time: {current_time format="%D, %F %d, %Y - %g:%i:%s"}
{exp:query sql="select member_id, last_visit, last_activity from exp_members"}
{member_id} - {last_visit format="%D, %F %d, %Y - %g:%i:%s"} - {last_activity format="%D, %F %d, %Y - %g:%i:%s"}
{/exp:query}

Current time: Mon, May 23, 2011 - 7:10:54

1 - Mon, May 23, 2011 - 5:45:15 - Mon, May 23, 2011 - 7:06:42