I’m pretty new to Discourse (migrated recently from phpBB), and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how things work here. Some of it makes perfect sense, but other parts are still a bit confusing – like sudden flashes of clarity followed by total “what the hell is this” moments.
Right now, I’ve noticed that Sidekiq shows as “idle”, and I’m not sure if that’s normal behavior or a sign that something’s broken. I’ve already tried doing a ./launcher rebuild app, but Sidekiq still sits there with 0 jobs processed, no retries, no active workers – just completely idle.
The forum is running, but I’m seeing some odd behaviors:
Notifications don’t seem consistent
Some tasks feel like they never finish
Things feel a bit “off” in ways I can’t quite explain
So, honestly, I’m not sure if there’s really a problem, or if I’m just misreading how Discourse works under the hood. Could it be that Sidekiq just doesn’t have anything to do right now? Or should it normally be doing something, even on a low-traffic forum?
I’d really appreciate any insight. Maybe I’m chasing a ghost here, but I’d rather ask than keep second-guessing myself.
We’re all seeing the “last visit” line in exactly the same spot, between the same two posts — across all user accounts. It’s not personalized, which seems strange.
As for Sidekiq: based on the screenshots, it does appear to be running fine — the graphs are updating, and the “idle” status probably just means it has nothing to process at the moment because all jobs are already done.
Still, this “last visit” behavior is confusing, and I’m wondering if something’s not working as intended, or if we’re just misinterpreting how it should function.
It looks like the red “last visit” line appeared in the exact same spot for all users.
What’s the logic behind that?
Is it intentional?
Is it a bug?
I honestly don’t understand it — it seems counterintuitive. I would have expected that line to reflect each user’s individual reading history, but instead, everyone is seeing it in the same place.
I’m self-hosting Discourse on a VPS at Vultr.
No CDN or proxy like Cloudflare is configured — at least nothing I’ve intentionally set up. It should be a fairly standard setup with just NGINX as the web server.
Everything else seems to be working fine — Sidekiq is running (shows as idle, but graphs update), notifications arrive, and chat works.
The only odd thing is that the red “last visit” line appears in exactly the same spot for all users, which seems like it shouldn’t happen.
Is there anything that could cause that on a fresh install? Maybe something related to how sessions or visit tracking is initialized?
Nothing that I’m aware of, but this goes beyond my skillset
Are you sure that it is behaving erroneously though? There aren’t that many topics, so the chances of everyone seeing it in the same spot (especially if that spot is at something like 9am, start of the workday) aren’t insignificant.
Honestly, I’m not even sure how that red “last visit” line is supposed to work, so I can’t really say if this is normal or not.
It just caught my attention because several users (including me) saw it in exactly the same spot – which felt odd.
But now someone else just shared a screenshot showing the line in a different position, so maybe everything is working as intended after all.
Still, if anyone could clarify how the “last visit” marker is calculated or stored, that’d be great.
I tried logging out, clearing cache, logging back in – but the line didn’t move all day. Just trying to understand what’s going on under the hood.
Ah, that explains a lot — thanks!
I didn’t realize the “last visit” marker is tied to a 1-hour threshold. I kept logging in and out, clearing cache, refreshing, etc., and the line just sat there like it was glued in place.
Makes total sense now. Appreciate the clarification — it wasn’t broken, I was just impatient!
