I have a chat client installed on Drupal. The admins will use the chat directly from their browser. However, the chat client makes users go "inactive" after 300 seconds. Therefore, for admins, who won't actively chat but who need to appear online, I need to make a call back to the server every now and then to tell it I'm active.
The system uses the sessions table to determine if a user was active the last X seconds. What is the easiest way to add another entry to this table so I can effectively call a page in javascript every X seconds?
Kinda hard to help without a bit more detail.. going out on a limb would say that it should suffice to have a background AJAX call to any page (probably the lighter the better) every X seconds or so.. when Drupal gets that call it should automatically update that table for you and therefore keep your session alive.
What I would look into alternatively would be for a way to actually change that inactive period and make it longer for Admins so you don't have to rely on gimmicks such as the AJAX call to make it work - no idea what that would entail though as we don't know what you're using for the chat and session management..