CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
user2422943
user2422943

Reputation: 11

PHP Script to Add One Every Hour

I'm new to PHP and I'm hoping to make a script where a user will get a "coin" every hour that they go on the page. For instance, if a user logs in twice during the same hour, they will only get one coin. But if they refresh the page during the next hour, they get another coin. However, they do not get coins when they do not refresh the page, even if many hours go by.

How would I even start going about doing this? Any help would be extremely appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1293

Answers (3)

Kryten
Kryten

Reputation: 15740

I'd do it this way:

On each page load (refresh, login, whatever), check to see if the user has already received a coin for the current hour. To do this, you need to know what the current hour is:

$hour = (new DateTime())->format("Y-m-d-h");

This will give a value like "2013-03-25-11" during the 11:00 hour. I'm including the date, since we don't to want skip giving a coin in, say, the 11 o'clock hour just because they were online yesterday at 11:05.

Then you can either:

  1. Add one to their coin total whenever you have a new $hour value (ie. it's not recorded in your database) and save the $hour value, or

  2. Save the $hour value in the database and count the total number of coins earned with a query like SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT hour) FROM table;

The first approach is useful if they're spending the coins on something (ie. you can add/subtract from their "coin account"); the second is useful if you just want a grand total of the number of coins (ie. the total number earned, ever).

Upvotes: 1

Wolfie
Wolfie

Reputation: 1381

I'm going to assume that you have a users table in a database.

If that is the case, you can use a column in the database to update the latest time that a user has gone on the page with php and a query on that page. Then you can set up a cron job that runs every hour that will query the users table and see if the user has viewed the page within the last hour. If the user has viewed the page within the last hour, increment the amount of coins associated with that user.

Upvotes: 0

Praveen Kumar Purushothaman
Praveen Kumar Purushothaman

Reputation: 167162

Easy... :) If you are using MySQL or something to store the coins, get the time too, when the coin was credited. And each time the page is called, check the time. A pseudo code would be like this:

load(coins);
timeDiff = timeNow - timeLastCredited;
if (timeDiff > 1 hour)
  coins++;
save(coins);

In case of PHP, I guess you may do like this:

$coins = getCoins(); // Assuming this function will load the current coins count from DB.
$lastCredit = getLastCoinCreditedTime(); // Should return a DateTime integer.
$timeDiff = microtime() - strtotime($lastCredit);
if ($timeDiff > 60*60*60*1000)
  saveCoins($coins+1); // Assuming this function saves the new number of coins.

Upvotes: 1

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