… but some not. Why?
It shows who’s on the board when the circle is a brighter green.
I’ll echo the response you got when you asked here.
The green light indicates the person is surfing the forum.
Just testing my posting ability, nothing to see here.
Begone!
NNNI see black and purple spots around my user name.NNN
Mark of the Beast. Call Security.
Surfing the forum or surfing the board? Say I left Cafe Society and popped over to MPSIMS. Would people in Cafe Society see a dark circle?
No – it’s at the site, not in a particular forum.
A slightly more technical answer.
The “board” has no real way to know if you have a page of the SDMB currently up on your screen. It only knows the last time you requested a page. After that, you could go on to surf a dozen other sites, or you could leave the same page up for an hour or more.
There is a “timeout” value (I think it’s 15 minutes) where the SDMB assumes that if it hasn’t heard from you within that time, you have gone away.
So, it is possible that your “green indicator” could be on for a while after you have left, or it’s also possible that if you are spending a lot of time reading a particular thread that your indicator may go out while you’re still here.
Move your mouse pointer over one of the circles, a tooltip comes as follows:
[username] is online/ offline.