Is rewriting a page the best way for Currently Watching

Hi

I’m looking for a plugin to display pages that other people are currently reading.
The only plugin available seems to be https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/currentlywatching/ which has not been updated for over two years and does seem to be supported anymore.

That’s not a problem though. The plugin appears to semi-work and the issues it has looks like they can be solved can be simply solved.

The biggest issue is that the plugin re-writes the entire post in order to record it being watched. The way it does it means that shortcodes doesn’t work and formatting is stripped and any insertions sent via the functions.php file does not work.

I don’t think that this is too big a job to fix but I wonder if a full page re-write is the best way forward.

While I’m happy to rehash the ajax to display the currently being read posts I would image that there is a better way to record the page being read than a total page re-write.

Is there a better way to monitor pages being rad through monitoring database calls or writing some sort of ping mechanism through a custom field?

Just throwing it out there for a bit of advice or guidance.

Thanks
Kevin