How to tell if user just navigated to the page or was waiting on the page?

Question

I want to register if user has been on the page for a while (waiting for some content to load) or has just came to a page.. What would be the best way to do that? I am using Rails and jquery.

Thanks

Duplicate (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/667555/detecting-idle-time-in-javascript-elegantly) — Gabriel Santos, May 23 '12 at 18:46
@GabrielSantos He's not detecting idle. Idle would imply they're doing nothing. He wants to detect if they are there (which doesn't necessarily mean they're idle) — Aidanc, May 23 '12 at 18:57

Aidanc · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-23T18:51:01.907

All users will "come" to the page but if you want to be alerted after they're there for a specific amount of time you could set a timer to send an ajax request after a number of seconds.

For example, the following code would execute the function inform after every 5 seconds. Informing you that the user is still waiting...

setTimeout("inform()",5000);

The function inform would be an AJAX request which informs the backend that the user is waiting. If you only want the request to fire once or after a number of runs stop firing then you could remove it with clearTimeout().

If you want the timeout to only run while the user is waiting on a specific piece of content to load. You could have the clearTimeout() execute when the content you expect will be delayed returns.

You can find some more info on timeouts here.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 23 '12 at 18:41

0

Javascript setTimeout ok for you?

It will kick off some code after however long you set it for.

answered May 23 '12 at 18:41

Limey

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

You can watch mouse movement, but that's about the best you're going to get for indication of a user still being there without listening to the click event. But there is no way for javascript to tell if it is the active tab or if the browser is even open. (well, you could get the width and height of the browser and that'd tell you if it was minimized)

From https://stackoverflow.com/a/1009268/744255

How to tell if user just navigated to the page or was waiting on the page?

3 Answers3