PId6
2009-06-03, 10:51 PM
I've been on many forums and this has bothered my curiosity for a while now. On many forums, you can see whether a person is online or not (see little green/black light thing below each person's avatar). On some of them, you can even see what page the person is looking at. But how does it do that?
Now, I'm not too familiar with the internal workings of the internets, but it seems to me that when you access a page with your browser, shouldn't it just retrieve information from the website one time? The browser certainly isn't refreshing that information unless I manually refresh it, so it shouldn't be constantly retrieving new information from the website. How then, does the forum know that you're still viewing it?
Now, I'm not too familiar with the internal workings of the internets, but it seems to me that when you access a page with your browser, shouldn't it just retrieve information from the website one time? The browser certainly isn't refreshing that information unless I manually refresh it, so it shouldn't be constantly retrieving new information from the website. How then, does the forum know that you're still viewing it?