Show visitor as 'online' while visiting a page live - and then 'offline' when they leave the page - possible with Bubble?

Hey all,

Maybe a strange one.

Visitor (anonymous) visits public page A, we’d like to show that Visitor A is currently viewing the public page to User A and then when the visitor leaves, show that Visitor A is no longer live viewing this page.

Any thoughts on how this might be possible?

I’ve looked at the basic workflow interactions and nothing stood out as obvious, and i’m reluctant to use any third party plugins.

without 3rd party data collection, it seems tricky to do on bubble (even though they do it themselves!) One hack is to store when users change page, and treat a page change in the last few mins as Live. Remember, even a unlogged in visitor can be treated as a user.

Thank you for the quick reply!

Ok, that’s a shame. I like your hack but if they simply leave the page (e.g. close browser) - this won’t work unfortunately.

Trying to think of ways to get better analytics for my end-users, things like video play / embed clicks etc. - and this would have been a really nice feature.

you are right, there are tonnes of feature that would be useful, but presence detection is kind of beyond the scope of bubble, and there are plenty of plugins and APIs that can do that kind of thing for you if you set it up correctly. Have a look at segment.

My understanding is that a page or browser close is not some thing that any app detect, rather it may be the absence of the open window that is reported. It may be possible to poll ever 10 seconds or so, but does a browser window that’s left on overnight count?!

Thanks, I didn’t mean that comment in a negative way - I am in awe of Bubble, just a little greedy I guess!

We use Segment on our main app, let me take a look at how that might work as I’m very familiar with it, this might well be an option.

I guess some form of workaround could be to try and check for the absence of any activity, and if that’s the case for 10 minutes the ‘users session’ is now offline, for example - and I could perhaps even simply use GTM for this. So if no clicks, no page movement happen within X time - user is deemed to have left.

Thank you, the back and forth has prompted some ideas, so I appreciate it.

Hey, I get it, we all want nice juicy features that make our lives easier, and there are plenty of ‘no brainier’ features that I still can’t believe don’t exist! but then I see the relentless bubble bashing that the small team who work tirelessly to build a fantastic product sometimes receive, and feel bad! :stuck_out_tongue:

Yes that is how I am trying to provide ‘active user’ status at the moment. Basically adding timestamp to as many workflows as possible workflows.

Regarding segment, its not something I have used in anger yet, but planning to deploy on my app very soon.

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So what I have done in the past is just run a workflow every minute or so on the user when they are on the page. Then I save that data into the database under the user called “last seen”. Then you can calculate how many people are online by calculating current date time minus 5 minutes and see who shows up. Does that make sense?

It’s a workaround but maybe you can do something similar in your situation.

Hope that makes sense.

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thank you for this, this is interesting.

Can you explain the specific workflow you run on the user every minute? I’m looking at the workflows and nothing is standing out as being something I can run ‘on the user’. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mind pointing me in the right direction, as this sounds like a great option, too.

Also, would you run that as a backend workflow?

They deserve zero bashing. Great product, and what’s ironic - is that the users building product with their product no doubt get users complaining - you’d think there would be mutual empathy!

Thank you re: this, I’m going to check this timestamp out as an option, as well as J805’s below, too!

So there is a workflow to do something every 5 seconds or something.

I’m not at my computer right now but I think that’s what It says.

Just use that on the page that you want to track. Or on every page depending on what you are tracking.

Just change the 5 seconds to something longer like 60 seconds.

Looks like this: Can repeating group refresh?

This might not work at all, but maybe you could change a Thing called “online” to “yes” when they click log in, and change the Thing to “no” when they click log out?

Then you could use that to show online if thing is yes and vice versa.

Maybe something like that could be combined with EFactive plugin (I think it’s called). I don’t fully remember how that plug in works, but I think it spits out something useful?

Hack it till it breaks!

Hello guys. @matthew2 did @J805 solution work with you? I am trying to do the same. Would you mind share with me what you did concerning this.

Thanks in advance!

Hi There is also this plugin @matthew2

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