Skin: show forum users

[Seahorse]

old-school-internet-explorer-user-type.png

[moshi]

You probably need to make sure you have "logged in" in Internet Explorer as the "Who is online" page is only for logged in members.

-Brian

???

i am really confused now. if that would work wouldn't there be myriads of Facebook skins?
can anyone confirm that scraping http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewonline.php without any external tool like curl works?
i doesn't work for me

[jsmorley]

Logged into the forums in Internet Explorer:

ieyes.png

Not logged in with Internet Explorer, IE cookies cleaned:

ieno.png

Understand, it is only about a cookie stored in Internet Explorer, nothing to do with Firefox or Chrome or whatever. The other thing, although I'm no expert on it, is that I suspect this only works for sites that store a really standard, old-school cookie in IE. I'm not sure it would have any effect with sites that use OAuth or other more complicated "certificate-based" session management.

In any case, the downside to creating a skin that takes advantage of this are:

1) Really, who uses Internet Explorer and are also the sort that use Rainmeter?
2) When the cookie expires or you are otherwise logged out in IE, the skin will just fail.

[eclectic-tech]

Oops!

IE only, huh?

Okay... too bad, I'm not going to resurrect IE just for this.

Thanks

[moshi]

i only get the login page. Internet Explorer 10, logged in, even set as standard browser for now. guess i can live with that.

[jsmorley]

i only get the login page. Internet Explorer 10, logged in, even set as standard browser for now. guess i can live with that.

Not sure why you are not getting the page when you have a cookie active. I certainly do. We have run into this before with gmail:

http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=54560#p54560

The symptom came to light with a user who:

1) Was logged into one of their gmail accounts via Internet Explorer
2) Had more than one account
3) Had an incorrect user id or password set in a gmail-checking skin that was checking the "second" account.

What they always got was the info (count etc.) for the "first" account in the skin, which was pretty puzzling until we tracked down this "cookie in IE" deal...

All in all, it is just a huge security failure of IE, is not at all reliable for use in skins, and both demonstrates why you should always log out (in any browser) from any sites you access that have personal or private information when you are done with them, and provides one more reason to shop around for a modern web browser.

[ikarus1969]

I have update the skin to again read the info from the main page.
As i usually checked the checkbox to be "always logged in" in the forum i didn't know until now that the "who is online" page makes some problems...

I also added a line to open the browser on double-click on the icon - thanks for the suggestion!

edit: have to use IE at the office, use Firefox everywhere else

[ikarus1969]

When looking for phpBB driven forums which i can use as a test for my skin i tried the forum of phpBB itself: of yourse quite a lot of guests, crawlers/spiders/bots...