Why not have a little light or something that will let us know when a user is at school, work or elsewhere?

Hmmm. Sounds very Facebookish. Kind of like a profile status that can be updated.

Would it be an invasion of privacy if we went with this idea?

Pretty soon the "Users Logged In" section will become a user activity section, letting us know who is doing what, where here at RD (similar to RetroJunk showing who is reading what in the forum, but more comprehensive). This was a long time coming, and something of a challenge, so once it arrives keep an eye open for errors or issues that might result. I have backed up the site and database prior to the new, incoming code for this... just in case.

It has been tested on Moudy's development server version of the site, so hopefully all goes well.

I thank you and Moudy for trying to make this become a reality for this site.

Most likely sessions that are started once logged in are never terminated due to inactivity and never expire until the user explicitly logs out. Which may be why almost every known user is considered to be still logged in. 

Linux_Sage wrote :

For an Activity Section using this approach there's the potential for a similar situation where everyone's considered to be online displaying what they last viewed but most likely aren't looking at the site anymore they just closed the browser and off doing something else. 

-end quote

You're right about the neverending sessions for Users Logged In. Well, actually it was just a column in one of the tables that simply labeled users "online" or "offline", dependent on them physically logging in or out. Unless they physically log out, they are always logged in (though only a portion are showing up now, as I manually logged everyone out a while back in the database - via a command in phpmyadmin).

Naturally, for this new feature, their status will only change when the Home page is refreshed or landed on from another page on the site. But it WILL change (at least that was what I asked for). It will either show what they are doing as of that moment - at least with a span of a few minutes following their previous action - or they'll disappear after some time of inactivity. So if they do close the browser or leave, it shouldn't take long for them to disappear from the section. I don't know what that'll be... 5 minutes maybe. 10 at the most.

Retro-Daze is one of the few sites where I'm actually able to logout. Other sites show me online all the time. So much for having a username and password.