Feature to show activity of user

Question

I was wondering if it would be beneficial to have activity buttons showing the activity of users?

E.g., in Gmail, on the chat list, you can see if your contacts are logged in(green), dormant(orange), or logged off(grey)

I was thinking maybe it could be implemented in this site as well, just to let people whether or not to expect a response anytime soon to a querying comment.

E.g., I ask a question. Someone answers it. I'm still not quite clear, so I put a comment below asking about a particular point I want to clear up. But, I don't know if my answerer has already logged off or not, and I might wait for say half an hour before I realise he is off. Then, I will log off, and wait the next day.

Whereas, activity buttons will save me this waiting.

Anyone who had this thought before?

Answer 1

The closest thing is the "seen" on your profile, like this:

Proposals have been made about this feature on MSO, but they have all been rejected. For example:

• Online/offline or Away status indicator in Stack overflow
• Can we show status of user? [closed] (duplicate)
• Is there a way to identify whether users are online or not?
• How to check users online or offline [closed] (duplicate)

Answer 2

This is already implemented. You can see if a user is currently active by looking at his profile. It will show "last activity" on EL&U. This line changes colors depending on the time of last activity.