Still shows as Online in posts when logged out

  • Affected App
    WoltLab Suite Forum

    Look at the picture which was taken about 1 or 2 minutes after I'd logged out my forum and was reading a post I'd made previously. Why is it showing me as still being Online when I've manually logged out forum?



    I've tried logging out here then, checked this post as a guest and it doesn't show me as logged-in here still right away. So how comes it does on my forum then? It took about 8-10 minutes then after logging-out forum for it to finally remove Online indicator from my post on my forum.

  • I have not altered session time-out at all, it is set same as it was from stock install 3 days ago.



    But never noticed that other setting of User-Online timeout. I guess that is it then, only removes you 900 seconds later. But shouldn't a log-out of forum remove you immediately. As that seems to be related with removing you as Online after not moving around forum (you become inactive) when still logged-in after 900 seconds sat doing nothing.


    I've never know forum software after you log out to keep you showing as online in posts.

  • Same on my test setup, with default settings for sessions. Wonder if they have different session settings here or if it has to do with a Cloudflare setting since this site is behind Cloudflare, which wouldn't make sense.

  • Just tested here, and logged out, reloaded this thread and it still showed me as online, so scratch that, must be controlled via the session timeout. Can't they tear the session down on logout to prevent that from happening?

    • Official Post

    For performance reasons the lastActivityTime column in the user table is used to determine the online state. This avoids the rather costly join of the session table which can cause significant performance drawbacks if there are a lot of users online at the same time.


    Usually people don't log out and keep browsing the site, instead the browser and/or tab is closed, therefore the actual user doesn't notice this.


    It is some sort of trade-off between performance and accuracy; While we could join the session table on small forums, it wouldn't scale well on bigger forums. We have a strict policy of designing every component to scale properly.

    Alexander Ebert
    Senior Developer WoltLab® GmbH

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!