I am currently working on a registration based website, and I have the server sending an activation email to the user upon registration. This is all done in PHP so, as you can imagine, I am using the mail() function.
This is all fine and dandy, once the user gets the email and clicks the activation link, the 'active' field that is in the 'Users' table is set to true. Here's the problem though, in the case that a user does not confirm their email address, what am I to do?
I have thought of holding details like the date and time the user registers but I don't know how to proceed with this data. How do I have the server automatically delete the user from the database after a set amount of time?
That's what I think I should be asking, but in all honesty I don't know the usual protocol...
Conclusion: Since Cron is for Unix based servers I've had to pass on it, but I found it very interesting that I could just use the Windows Task Scheduler that is built into Windows. This at least means I can test it on my PC before any server hosting. Thank you all
You should definitely store the date and time that the activation link was sent.
There isn't really a way to tell the server to automatically delete stale user data, but it's easy enough to code up yourself. Assuming you have access to cron on your server, you can set up a cronjob to run (for example) every night at 2am and execute a PHP script that searches the database for users who were sent a link more than X days ago but never confirmed it
i think the solution would be Storing the timestamp while sending the mail.
now run a cron every 15minutes which would check that which values are having timestamp more than 24hrs or any timelimit you want and then delete it from db
Just call in your index.php file the following code. (Why index.php ? - because it is requested every time and can "act" as a cronjob.)
(Just Pseudo Code - might need some tweaks!)
mysql_query("DELETE FROM user WHERE active = 'false' AND registerTime < (NOW-60*60*24*7)")
This will delete all Users which have not been activated within 7 Days.
It's just a concept idea i think you can build on.
You should look into cronjobs that you run daily. Simply put in a field in your database with the time your user registered.
Related
I've created an iOS and android app that uses a database where users can login which in my case "User_active" gets changes to 1 and logged out gets changed to 0. The only problem I have is that I cannot check to see if the user has left the app, or if they have closed it, so what I want to do is create an event on phpmyadmin to change the "User_active" to 0 after 30min, but I can't seam to get things right. I'm using Awardspace as my host and I've only seen tutorials for localhost. Errors that I'm getting are that my user account does not have the write privileges to create the events and I cannot find any user tabs to change user privileges. If anyone can send me off in the right direction that would be great or even better a solution.
phpMyAdmin is a fantastic interactive tool, but it is not the tool for this.
In some ways, this is a fairly common problem. Typical web based applications don't know when a user has left, they only know when a user does something. One method is to do the following:
1 - Add a field to the user table (the same table that has the "user_active" field) to track the last activity by that user of any type. This should be a DATETIME or TIMESTAMP field and updated always with the current time.
2 - Add a cronjob to check any records in the user table to see if they are (a) still logged in (user_active=1) and the timestamp is more than 30 minutes old. If so, set user_active to 0 - essentially force a logout after 30 minutes. You may want to have an additional field to indicate it was a forced automatic logout rather than a user-initiated logout.
If your hosting service allows cronjobs, then run this periodically (perhaps every 5 minutes) and you are done. If your hosting service doesn't allow cronjobs then one option is to add a call to the "automatic user logout" function as part of every regular page. That won't work if you have thousands of active users as the overhead would be too much (and the delay on each page display). But if you have a small number of active users it will get the job done - I have done plenty of system housekeeping using that method.
I am developing a WordPress plugin that fetch user Instagram Profile info and store in database via WordPress wp_remote_get() function. A Corn job runs after every 24 hours that update the user's Instagram Info on daily basis. The problem is I've about 5000+ users and the script runs too long and the task never completed. Everything was working great when users quantity was under < 1000.
Which PHP settings in php.ini should I change to solve this issue? I've set max_execution_time to 0. Any other setting? Any suggestions?
I advice you to do the folowing
create more than one cron job which call same file
after update the user .. mark him as updated
do not update any user if he is marked as updated
make the updating function as transaction (finsh all or cancel all)
finally increase time out also good
Hard to make a valid recommendation without knowing your specific scenario, but I would change your code in the way that it visits instagram profile only when needed as opposed to for everyone via cron job. First, the info will be 'fresher', second, you'll avoid having the problem you're describing.
For instance, when a user visits their profile, a call is made to Instagram and data is pulled. You store the data in your database the same way as before, only with a timestamp. Also in the code, make sure that it doesn't pull data unless it's been 24 hours since the last refresh. Hope this helps.
I am using php and Mysql.
I have a record in my database and i want to check status value of the record after 24hrs of its insertion if it is still in pending or no changed i want to send an SMS and an Email to some person relevant to the status.
To achieve this i have implemented a solution in which i used a php code but it need to continuously execute and check status of record that may cause DoS.
In Another solution i create a trigger but i can't able to send db values as parameter to the php file.
so what should be its solution????
Two ways came into my mind for this.
First, (the good way) using cronjob. It's a really good way.
Second, (bad way for your purpose) Check to see which rows has age of 30 days in each request coming to website. There are cons for this way as the website doesn't get visitors for some days then SMS or Emails won't be sent on time. Another bad thing is it executes on every request so loading time and memory will be consumed during this process.
created a php file which contains a functionality of send sms and email.
then create cronjob:
wget http://example.com/x.php
provide full address of your file.
while creating cronjob set time interval 24hrs
I need some help regarding the implementation of the following alarm.. Here's the flow of the program, user login to the system and then they can click the hyperlink create schedule and then from there they can create schedules using the form. After which, user can choose to start this schedules that they created and they can allocate a timeframe to it. For eg, if the user assign the schedule to run at 2pm the system will have a pop up to notify and inform the user to run this schedule probably 15 mins before 2pm..
I would like to know what are the ways to implement this in php and if possible is there any reference i can use on the website? I've tried to find but apparently most scripts are paid etc.
I think you are looking for scheduler kind of thing, to do this in php
you can use scheduler for windows os
cron job for *nix based os
Yes the answer to this question is pretty much related to CRON job. Take a look at this answer
Execute Query on a Specific Date and Time
You need to write a PHP script that scans the db and sees for the user who should be notified (i.e their deadline has arrived). Run this script in the scheduler (maybe every 1 hour) and it will do the magic for you. Good luck with your notifications :)
No cron job is needed if you only notify user with popup on the web site, however, you will need a cronjob if you want to send emails.
You will have to store users schedules (possibly in a db table)
When the user logs in php should check if there's a task due in the schedules table for that user: if yes show the pop up.
You will need to create an ajax call (with users id) that will call a certain php (say ajax.php) file every minute. You can help yourself with jquery.
The ajax.php should check if there was a task due in the past. If yes it returns job details (as json or html, you chose) else it just returns that there are no jobs.
When the calling ajax code recieves an answer from ajax.php, it does nothing if the answer is that there are no jobs or displays a popup with job details recieved from ajax.php.
The user can dismiss the call (delete it from the schedules db table) snooze or reschedule it (update the due date in the schedules db table).
Don't forget about security especially in the ajax.php: it has to check if the user is logged in.
Only if you want to prompt non logged in users by email you will need to set up a cron jobs, that will ping the ajax.php file periodically.
I'm not awesome enough to write a chat application, and I'm trying to get one to work, and I've recently downloaded one from here, it's pretty good so far, as I've tested it out on XAMPP, but I have a slight problem. I'm trying to generate a list of online users to give it a more practical application-like feel, but the problem with that, is I have no clue how to do it easily.
When users login to my site, a session named g_username is created, (the chat says 'username', but I'll fix that) and from what I see so far, the easiest method would be to store their username in a database called OnlineUsers and call that data via Ajax, but, the other problem, is that it's session based, and sometimes the users can just leave, without logging out, and I intended to run a script to logout the user from both the OnlineUsers table, and by deleting the session.
If they leave without logging out, they'd be online forever! I could potentially suffix a bit of code on every page, that toggled an ajax event on page close, the event being a script that kills their OnlineUsers table record, but then again, that would load the server with useless queries as users jump between pages, as far as I'm aware.
Creating my entire site in Ajax isn't really an option, as it's a load of different sites combined in to 1 'place' with a social 'layer' (if you will) from a social service.
Does anyone see a way to do this that would make sense, and be easy to integrate, and do with Apache, without command line access?
You could so something like storing a timestamp of the users last action in a database, comparing that timestamp when outputting online users and making sure that it was done at most 1 min ago.
Run on all/vital pages:
(Deciding if the last action is outdated, you could also check if it was done for one minute ago to reduce the database-load)
if($user['lastAction'] < time()) {
//update into database, last action is outdated
}
When calculating the amount of users online and is within the loop of each timestamp
//If the users last action was within a minute, the user is most likely online
if(($row['lastAction']- time()) > 60*60)
//count user as online
you could have a cron job [if you have cpanel] running on the server once every 60secs or so, that checks when a user last sent anything via the chat if they have not in the last lets say 5mins then remove their entry from the online users list.