Autoonline from AntonLV

Hello everybody.

This is a support forum for our Autoonline module.

If you have some questions or suggestions regarding it feel free to post them here or contact us directly.

A few feature requests for this.

1) Ignore Admin account(s)

2) Filter for Male/Female/Couple accounts

3) Ability to have only a selection of accounts set for autoonline

Otherwise, pretty cool :)

1) Can be easily achieved via a simple patch:

edit the file modules/aqb/autoonline/classes/AqbAutoonlineModule.php,

replace the line (2 occurrences):

$where = 'WHERE (`Couple`=0 OR `Couple`>`Profiles`.`ID`) AND `Status` = "Active" AND ';

with

$where = 'WHERE (`Couple`=0 OR `Couple`>`Profiles`.`ID`) AND `Status` = "Active" AND `Role` <> 3 ';

2) Makes sense. We will try to find some spare time to add this feature.

3) This was discussed here.

Would the fix for profile fields enabling members to be chosen for being autoonline work also on the View Profiles for the admin, not just on the edit page? That way I could save myself few clicks along the way... :)

 No unfortunately, because there is no way of changing profile fields on a profile view page. If you need some way of changing that on profile view page then this could be implemented as a custom modification for a fee. PM us if interested.

 I see. :) By the way, would there be a way to give the admin option to restrict let's say US members from being online for the duration of night? I mean, if there was an option related to the location of the member enabling the admin to forbid such members to appear for approx 12 hours, give or take, when the night proper is in the member's location? It just would make a whole lot more sense if US member wasn't online past midnight, or a member from Japan for their midnight and so on...

 Most likely no. Because

1) There is no any 100% valid way of determining member's time of day because of timezones. There are a lot of countries which are living in several timezones and thus when some part of such country is having a night the other may have an evening yet.

2) Implementing such complex algorithms would make that simple module much more complex and thus the price a little bit bigger while we are trying to avoid this.

Yup, but aren't they filling their locations?

Well, even if admin had to do it manually, to check, let's say, Buenos Aires timezone then setting up either timezone or forbidden time area to appear online, I'd be up for it.

Or let's just say, if there was something similar to the field Isautoonlineallowed, but maybe allocating one from let's say, 6 hours blocks (I mean, 4 blocks consisting of 6 hours each) when the member would be stopped from being online? Default would be no limitations, of course. It'd mean more manual effort but I think it'd be more realistic in the end.

Since if I make a member "sleeping" for 6 hours approximating roughly to when they have the real night- actually even if the 6 hour chunk is not precise for given country (for example, 7-12am site time covers perhaps half of night for the Mid-West of US), there can be few cases of someone being up for few hours at night. :)

Well, I hope it makes sense? :)

 Yup, but aren't they filling their locations?

Yes, but only Country may be used since City is just a simple text field which allows to type in anything and it can't be used without a dependency to some 3rd party service to determine the timezone. Moreover some sites aren't using locations fields so this wouldn't be a general solution. That is another reason why this will not go to a production.

Well, even if admin had to do it manually, to check, let's say, Buenos Aires timezone then setting up either timezone or forbidden time area to appear online, I'd be up for it.

Admin would have to set up timezone manually for each an every member of the site. I doubt that this would be a popular feature of the module because of that.

 If you really need that feature then we can implement it as a custom modification for you for a fee. Send us a private message if interested to discuss the details and the price.

I'll think about the custom feature but in the meantime, I must disagree with the manual thing being so bad idea.

First of all, I'm not sure you understood my point of thinking that having autoonline members is cool on one hand but how un-cool it is to have them online when they should be sleeping? Autoonline is fine for one-time visitors, but what happens when someone joins and keeps coming back? Those smarter shall notice that someone from LA or Tokyo keep on being online on LA or Tokyo late nights, day after day. One or two cases are actually ok and normal, lol, but how do you keep control on settings let's say, 1 to 50 autoonline profiles every 30 minutes? You can have 50 LA members on when it is 4am in the morning in LA. That's not cool, that's silly.

So when you've said A, do please say B as well. Autoonline like it is now is like a tool you buy to simulate life in your flat while you're away on holiday but it switches on any time of the day. It works fine BUT how long before any decent burglar shall notice that sounds of the same music are on and off 24/7? Besides, I thought Dolphin was for social networks, not for blogs, lol, so you or me cannot assume people come only once and that they won't notice a white elephant even if it stood in front of them? ;)

Secondly, not EVERY member is set up to be autoonline. Right? ;)

Thirdly, not every admin need to use this. But IF there was an option on edit profiles to choose from 4 timeblocks each consisting of six hours, to make an auto-member "sleeping" on a chosen time slot, I'd use it, even if I had to go through the editing again. BESIDES, I'd have to do auto field option for the admin exactly this way, right (= manually editing profile field)? ;)

Actually I suspect that to create such profile field would be quite easy, unfortunatelly I'm not too skilled in this, so... Also, since I HAVE TO adjust Autoonline field on the profile manually anyway, this would just mean only one (actually two, lol) more click(s) (and also, it would mean checking the approx timezone difference for the given member BUT how difficult is to remember difference for Japan or LA or Sydney in all other members from the roughly same area? Even cases like Perth vs Sydney or Mumbai vs Dhaka have no big time difference so anyone clever needs to jot down only perhaps 12 main timezones and derive all the rest from these = so the timezone checking mostly needs to be done only once, right?); and as I said, a bit more work for better result AND possible less needed amount of Autoonline members in reserve, well, isn't it obvious that for your product would be better if bunch of profiles weren't made online on let's say 3am of their time?

If you don't think so, then let me know your ideas and price for the full automatic timezone feature not only this quick profile field fix. Although I still think this should have something similar already, since making members online is one thing but doing it reastically is completely different thing.

P.S.: Just out of the top of my head, and I really shouldn't be giving such suggestions to improve your product, it should be your initiative... anyway, I dislike third party solutions because they slow down everything so why not to drop timezone checking and instead record login times for the members of the given area and create some sort of time template for Autoonline to block auto-members to appear, in order to make them "sleeping"?

Or, if too impractical, why not to use just the country info and call a pre-made definition for the given country when the night is?  This wouldn't work satisfactory only on few really big countries like US or Russia, but I'm sure something could be thought up to solve this as well?

...anyway, I still believe that the manual entry of the desired "sleeping" time block would be the easiest one to achieve. Ok, PM me price for some smart solution build either on the easy manual fix or something more elaborate, I'll decide...

Actually, it wouldn't even need manual editing of profile field. There can be an option in the admin, "Do you want to make autoonline members sleeping?", for example. If checked yes, then it could be automatic afterwards, checking country of autoonline member and assigning him or her 6 hours time block when he or she WON'T be made autoonline.

It'd just need some little database where every country would be assigned one of these 4 time blocks, depending on its timezone. Even these groups of countries with the same timezone can bunch countries with just one hour time difference together, for 12 database categories, for convenience. And every such group would have 12-6am time for their timezones specified, so ignore my above statement of 4 different time blocks, since only this night-time 12-6am would be assigned anyway.

Even medium sized countries (for east-west dimension) like Brazil or India can be sorted this way. For example, even if a country had 5 timezones and it was chosen the middle one of them to represent whole country (so there could be 2 hours in each direction actual difference), no big problem would occur, some members would appear at 2 am online and some at 4 am (if 6 hours block was built, to make them "sleep" at 12-6am, eg.), which would only be natural and statistically correct, since some people would be up at 2 am anyway. Some - but not all of them (like it happens now). ;)

So it leaves just Canada, US and Russia. Someone would need to figure out a way how to assign proper timezones for parts of their countries, at least west/east divide. But if the database has states or provinces for US/Canada, then it should be easy to group the states in the US or provinces in Canada into proper time zone groups. I think. :)

So it'd just leave Russia to sort out. :)

Also, since I HAVE TO adjust Autoonline field on the profile manually anyway, this would just mean only one (actually two, lol) more click(s) (and also, it would mean checking the approx timezone difference for the given member BUT how difficult is to remember difference for Japan or LA or Sydney in all other members from the roughly same area? Even cases like Perth vs Sydney or Mumbai vs Dhaka have no big time difference so anyone clever needs to jot down only perhaps 12 main timezones and derive all the rest from these = so the timezone checking mostly needs to be done only once, right?);Not quite. Everything is great as long as you're thinking only about large cities and small countries. What would happen when someone from Russia/Tver would join? Or USA/La Grange? You can't know what timezone each city of the world is in. So every time you're encountering a new city - you have to find out it's timezone.
Although I still think this should have something similar already, since making members online is one thing but doing it reastically is completely different thing.I agree with the last statement. But in that case the price would be much bigger than just a $20. What you're asking is much more complex module with a much more complicated logic, ways to use and requirements. And that is not what most of the people want I think. The beauty in the simplicity.
P.S.: Just out of the top of my head, and I really shouldn't be giving such suggestions to improve your product, it should be your initiative... anyway, I dislike third party solutions because they slow down everything so why not to drop timezone checking and instead record login times for the members of the given area and create some sort of time template for Autoonline to block auto-members to appear, in order to make them "sleeping"?Let's assume a member appears roughly at around 3AM server time. What should be considered as a night for that member? :)
but I'm sure something could be thought up to solve this as well?What I was trying to tell you is that I don't know any possible ways to correctly determine member's timezone without
a) knowing his city name in some international standard
b) having a database of timezones for all cities of the world or connecting to a 3rd aprty service to obtain timezone for a given city
So it leaves just Canada, US and Russia. Someone would need to figure out a way how to assign proper timezones for parts of their countries, at least west/east divide. But if the database has states or provinces for US/Canada, then it should be easy to group the states in the US or provinces in Canada into proper time zone groups. I think. :)And now Autoonline must add a State/Province field to join and edit page because Dolphin doesn't has it out of the box. :) I'm sorry but Autoonline must remain just a simple module and shouldn't modify Dolphin's join page or become such complex. That is the idea of $20 modules. If you need something specific, then no problem, we will help you. :) But for the entire life of this module you are the first one and the only one who was asking for that feature. And since that feature is too complicated and "rarely" asked then most likely it will not go to a production. We are sorry.

It actually pleases me to be the first one to ask for this. Lol. ;)

Well, if you have an idea how to and for how much, message me. ;)

Yesterday we've sent you 2 messages already. :)

 :)

It's funny but this Account in the menu above shows no new notifications. I guess 7.1 is not total success in the end, huh? Lol.

Hello everybody.
The module was updated. It's available for Dolphin 7.1 now.

Anton, is there a way to make a add-on to this module that some profiles will be rated also from the online members.

Probably not, but I need to ask :-)

 Actually it is possible, but only as a custom modification. Also I have to warn that such a feature can be very resource consuming for the database server since each rate action would require at least 2 database queries. So I would not recommend to use it in case your autoonline rules are affecting many profiles. If you're interested then send us a PM to discuss the details.

Hi,

I've bought the module, translated it to Slovenian language, installation went ok but there are some problems.

When module is installed and configured to let's say sets 50 members on-line (out of 500 registered) I can not set my own status to on-line from homepage or any page actualy. What is even worse real on-line users gets off-line status....

Any idea?

Regards

Mayki

Hi,

 The only guess I have is that your site is having some problems not connected to Autoonline. Autoonline do not affects any functionality of setting/removing statuses. It just once in 15 minutes updates DateLastNav (last navigation date/time) for selected profiles. And that is all. Moreover it never affects profiles which are online already (since that makes no sense), there is a special SQL filter there to achieve that. So if you're unable to set status, or for some reason real online members gets offline then it has nothing to do with the Autoonline.

 I am so sorry Anton, it was my mistake.

I made a stupid mistake while changing the line in admin.inc.php.

I've reinstalled the module and carefully changed the line and it works perfectly.

Again, I am sorry for this.

Kind regards

Mayki

 No problem. I'm glad the problem is solved.

Yes, it is.

Lots of members on line.... ha ha