A good question. How do we know someones status if he’s online or not?

I don’t think it’s really necessary.

Aleksandar Petrinic wrote:

I don’t think it’s really necessary.

I find it useful in most forums. If we know a user is online we might be interested in continuing the discussion and can wait for a reply.

We can have the user set the privacy policy whether his status should be shown or not.

If we implement this feature the default setting would be “do not show” in my opinion, and that would reduce the value of the feature a lot. We currently show the “last visit” date in the member list. Not the same I know but it’s as far as I would go without asking users for opt-in permission.

I would be very interested in hearing peoples opinions on this, I know others might not have the same aversion to “default = on” sharing settings as I have :)

Even someone won’t turn on this feature, someone else will do another way :) And that is reason to implement it, I guess.