[Suggestion] Time a channel is empty

[Barny1993]

Hiho!

yesterday I wondered if it´s possible to see the time a channel was last visited and I found following:

I wondered about the fact the server is counting the time in seconds instead of showing me a timestamp the last user left the channel. So I checked the database for a field ‘seconds empty’ or similiar but I couldn´t find one. Last conclusion for me: Only the Teamspeak service is counting the time. I restarted the server and voilá… for every channel the server started counting again from 0.

And I think the only use case for this feature is to track the time for temporary channels, right? My problem is, that there are a bunch of channels that are no longer visited on our teamspeak server and we would like to let them automatically deleted after some time of no visitors, but if we set them all as temporary the channels are gonna all deleted on a restart of the teamspeak service. So this is no option for us.

At the moment a sinusbot is doing this job for us, but is there a chance that you will implement a feature that saves a timestamp which is recorded after the last user leaves a channel? Or did I missed something?

Kind regards,

Barny

[Barny1993]

Hi FakE,

thanks for your detailed answer!

@FakE

The idea of adding this value to the database may sounds good but will result in a huge performance loss.
A specially for larger TeamSpeak server with a huge amount of channels.
Leaving or entering a channel would require a database request each time.

No, not in my mind, because the application could cache it like it is already doing. We would only need a database request for starting and closing the server, so that temporary channels would still exist on restarting a server. Usually I do restarts after teamspeak server updates or the root server requires a restart. That´s not so often, but would, like you already said, makes my calculations useless.

@FakE

The field “seconds_empty” will not give a timestamp of course.
Just calculate a unix timestamp minus “seconds_empty“ which will result in another timestamp you can convert to the date and time since the channel is empty.

Yes, you are right and I´m doing it right now like you said. Is the teamspeak application really incrementing some kind of integers for the calculation of ‘seconds empty’? I think the application is saving a timestamp, too, and calculates the seconds based on this timestamp to return the ‘seconds empty’ on every api call. Why not return a timestamp straight through? <-- This is only a suggestion and I do not even had a problem with this.

@FakE

To get of this issue you could save those results in an own database containing the channel identifier , it’s “seconds_empty” and the mentioned calculated timestamp.

Comparing the calculated timestamp with the server uptime will tell you to use the database entry as “real” empty-since value or the provided value by the server.

That´s a good solution. At the moment a wordpress plugin connects every hour to the teamspeak server query. On this call I could download the whole channel list with it´s ‘seconds empty’ value and compare them to the existing values like you said. Thanks a lot.

@FakE

The integrated auto-deletion timer is a great solution in my mind even if this works for temporarily channels only.

I´m totally with you, but it could also be used for much more things if it´s save the calculated values at some time in the database. Even if the application would save it on restart only. That would be much appreciated and maybe even the great mass will see the advantages of this feature.

Thanks a lot for your reply and your time.