Occasionally, I see words next to users’ names telling me whether they are online or not.
Are you talking about the little popup saying “x is online/offline” when you hover the cursor over the check mark graphic to the right of the user name? An example or two would be nice, although that might be hard to reproduce because the same page generated by two people might be coded differently.
You could save a page where this occurred and view the source. This popup is the “alt” tag for the check mark graphic and you could check whether or not it’s present. Here’s an example of the coding from another thread:
<IMG class=inlineimg alt="Zabali_Clawbane is offline"
src="Straight Dope Message Board - Hasn't AIDS always been around_files/user_offline.gif"
border=0>
I never knew that thing was there. Instead of that check mark, I was getting the words “so and so is offline” or whatever.
Now I see that it was simply the graphic failing to load.