Use GeekTool to view the online list of a PHPBB forum

Jan 11, '05 09:02:00AM

Contributed by: t3hl33t

Here's a GeekTool widget that shows you who's online on your favourite forum sites (as long as they use phpBB). The commandline to enter into GeekTool is:

/sw/bin/lynx -dump websitepath | grep 2005
Where websitepath is the URL of the forum, followed by /viewonline.php. For example, the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army forums are located at http://www.68kmla.net, which makes the websitepath is http://www.68kmla.net/viewonline.php. For another example, PHPBB's own forums are at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/, so the websitepath is http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewonline.php.

Problems/Difficulties and how they can be overcome:
  1. You need lynx. Get Fink and use that to install lynx.
  2. If you are reading this in 2006 or later, replace 2005 in the grep command with the current year.
  3. This only works with PHPBB forums. It can probably be adapted to work with other forums, though.
  4. Refreshing at high rates can be hard on the webhost. I set mine to go once every two minutes.
  5. For every person doing this, there will always be one guest "viewing who is online."
[robg adds: For vBulletin forums such as forums.macosxhints.com, it seems the websitepath would be http://forums.macosxhints.com/online.php?. However, vBulletin has a very lengthy user list display, so I'm not sure how useful this might be...]

Comments (4)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050107102556152