Hi guys,
I have one more feature suggestion in store: real-time visitor status. I assume that this is done by pooling visitor`s mouse movements/actions.There are several ways to do this, if we look at other analytics platform:
a) a simpler online-idle-offline. If a visitor opens a page it is online. After 60-300 seconds of inactivity (this depends on platform) (but with the page still open), the visitor becomes idle. As soon as the visitor refocus on the tab, moves the mouse, clicks or scrolls the page, the status instantly (i have seen a maximum 5-seconds delay) become online again. If the visitor closes the page it instantly goes offline. Otherwise it goes offline automatically after 30 minutes, even if the page is still opened.
b) there is also a more elaborate version which splits the online status into online(reading) / online (writing). Online-reading is activated when there is a movement of the mouse, and writing when the visitors is using the keyboard to type something.
I must add that this neat feature did not pose any performance issues. I had 450 simultaneously visitors on 1 site and they were categorized just fine, moving from idle to reading and so on in an instant…actually they were ordered in the list primarily according to their status (and then equal statuses were further listed according to the last action time), so when one visitor switched from idle to reading it moved up in the list, to the “reading” zone of the list.
In piwik`s particular case this visitor status could be easily represented in Visitor in Real-Time widged by a color square icon: green for online, red for idle and gray for online, as seen in the attached image. Or any other combination, I am not a good designer.
http://imageshack.com/a/img585/2295/2phf.png
PS: I tried to create a ticket with the exact text form above and it was rejected as spam, hence i posted here.