Why and how do Discourse forums work when offline?

Hello. I would like to know why there is a feature where you can use Discourse offline? (It partially works, some of the user cards work, and a few topics are loadable.) However, the issue is that it lacks functionality and non-loaded pages. I would also like to know how the offline stuff works.

Probably because of the javascript and data cached locally in the browser.

Clear your browser cache and I suspect you will no longer have these facilities!

It’s not intended to run fully offline, but this behaviour gives it some resilience when dealing with e.g. bad mobile connections.

4 Likes

We cache the last hundreds of requests on the browser by leveraging the WorkBoxJS library.

If an endpoint, like a user card, wasn’t loaded in recently it won’t be cached and won’t be accessible while offline.

5 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.