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Suddenly seeing players in my game logging in and out. And they say it's not them.

So I just wonder if there's been a security breach or something because today, while doing some stuff on my campaign page, I noticed one of my players pop up on line (their avatar appeared onscreen). They were on for about 20 mins then logged out. About an hour later another player appeared. This seemed odd so I contacted them both and asked about it. Both of them said it wasn't them. And that they hadn't been near their PCs all day. First time I ever saw this happen. Any thoughts?
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keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
Hi Andrew! I have not seen any other reports of this. Next time it happens, try grabbing a  Console Log ( Chrome , Firefox ). You can either file a  Help Center Request , or if you post here, I'll try to make this visible to the dev team. But the Help Center is more direct.
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Thanks, Keith They both report being logged in, and their PCs were on sleep. I saw them both appear and disappear online several times. Maybe roll20 occasionally detects them as online.
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keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
There has been behavior that can make someone look persistently logged in, i.e. they are registered as still being present if they exited the game by closing the browser window instead of logging out, but this sounds different. Hopefully a report to the devs with the right information can see what's going on.
I use a mod that act when a player comes online/goes offline. This event is triggered spuriously a lot. When you open the mod page in a (second)  browser tab, the following code will log spuriously/seemingly randomly. Don't know why, but that's what has happened consistently over the last years. It will also log (twice) when you press F5 on a game, or when the connection to firebase is lost (ie when the big red block with the message appears). on('ready',function() { on('change:player:_online', (obj,prev) => { log((new Date()).toUTCString() + " player _online event for " + obj.get('_displayname') + " changed to " + obj.get('online')); }); });
I had this same thing happen this weekend, and I think I'd seen it previously with someone else and hadn't realized it.  This time, Saturday night around 9 Eastern, one of my players' avatars disappeared from the bottom of the screen and came back about 20-30 seconds later.  I thought she was having a technical issue with Roll20 and asked if she was logging out to clear it, and from her perspective she was still connected and hadn't done anything. I'm guessing it's some kind of server issue (maybe a keepalive being missed?), but I didn't collect any info at the time as I was running my Saturday night game and had other things on my mind.  My internet was not having issues (wireed connection to comcast gig internet, and nobody else had problems, nor was our discord disrupted).
I tried @Martijn S's mod and had my test account logged into my game while I was doing some editing.  I noticed later that when the screen saver on the test computer had kicked in, the online status changed (I don't know if the avatar also disappeared, as I didn't think to look at it until after I'd woken the test computer up; my focus had been on updating handouts, not looking for players). So the root cause here could simply be people switching to other apps/tabs that cause the browser to "pause" the tab containing roll20.  Both Firefox and Edge at a minimum have that, and at least on my test copy of Firefox it was enabled (about:config, browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory) and I don't recall ever tweaking the Firefox config (it's on a username dedicated to roll20 player-view testing).  It's possible some aspect of this changed recently to make it more aggressive (MS's docs say Edge won't pause a tab until 2 hours of inactivity, for example, and my player was only inactive for ~10 min at most). Most of my players use Edge, although a few (like me) are Mac users and use Firefox. I'm not sure which Saturday's player was using.
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This time, Saturday night around 9 Eastern, one of my players' avatars disappeared from the bottom of the screen and came back about 20-30 seconds later. This is textbook behavior: firebase detects the disconnection and sends an online=false event to all connected clients. Whereas the browser client that disconnected will try to restore the connection in the background for some duration before showing the red box 'your connection to the server has been interrupted! <etc>' Also firebase is not infallible, as sometimes disconnect events are just lost.