BuddyPress.org

Hi @somethingelse

Have you ever thought about a custom solution using user meta? Something like:

// Hook this to a particular action.
update_user_meta( get_current_user_id(), 'active', current_time( 'mysql' ) );

Then you’d get that for display using something like this:

// $last_active will be a date-time string.
$last_active = get_user_meta( get_current_user_id(), 'active', true );

Refs:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_user_meta
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_user_meta

@shanebp is it worth escaping $user_id in the SQL statement? think you can use the prepare() method for that?

I was thinking the same (i.e. just used internally). It’s when you start doing things like last_profile_update( $_GET['user_id'] ) you have to worry lol. I suppose it’s worth it for the record…? here goes…

$last_update = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( 
	"
		SELECT date_recorded 
		FROM {$wpdb->prefix}bp_activity 
		WHERE user_id = %d 
                AND type = 'updated_profile' 
                ORDER BY date_recorded DESC 
                LIMIT 1 
	", 
	$user_id
) );

last_profile_update( $_GET['user_id'] ) is only a bad thing if you don’t escape $user_id in the SQL statement provided by @shanebp. That’s because $_GET['user_id'] could be tainted as it is received from the browser. In your case, you won’t be doing that. You’ll be providing the user ID yourself so using @shanebp’s SQL should be absolutely fine. If you were to accept the user ID from the browser, or from a user submission then that’s when you should use the prepare method (see my SQL above).

Hope that helps?