Why is my avatar blinking with orbital bubbles? I can’t make it go. I tried dismissing all notifications, it’s sticking there and making me crazy. Please remove this! I don’t seem to have access to any meaningful chat channel either.

The orbitals went away. Can someone please explain?

It happened with Discourse Rewind 2024. It should disappear once you visited it.

Yeah was too bad it disappeared. Kind of liked the visual effect over the simple dot/icon showing a notification. :wink:

It shows when you have not visited the Rewind page. I struggled to get rid of it as well, and once I did visit “Rewind” (which I love BTW) I can’t find a way to get the link or the effect back. assets/stylesheets/common/rewind-header.scss 824d4a426 } .rewind-notification-active #toggle-current-user::after { width: 48px; height: 48px; position: absolute; left: -4px; top: -4px; content: ""; background-image: absolute-image-url( "/plugins/discourse-rewind/images/rewind-avatar-2-shimmer.gif" ); display: block; background-size: cover; }

Yeah for some reason you have to refresh the page to get rid of it. @jordan.vidrine built it so he can probably comment more.

Be great to have a #theme-component to add the effects as alternative notifications. :wink:

This animation is very troubling. Thank you all who responded. Indeed @HAWK, this is when I opened an internal link into a new tab that I noticed the animation had disappeared. I reloaded the original tab and it went away. It’s not so good for epilepsy and other troubles related to stress. WRT the Discourse Rewind, it looks nice and is quite funny, but somehow found that #ai is an interesting tag for me: maybe because I tried to mute all AI things? – I think I muted that tag anyway.

Yes, the hovering dots were mostly just a visual attractor for rewind. It was there to get people to click on their avatar, open the notification panel, and see that rewind was available to view :smile: Once you click through to the rewind page, that animation will no longer load, but it does require a refresh. Since this was just an experimental plugin, we didn’t go too deep in storing this data on the user in the DB. We just opted for local storage. So if you really want to see it appear again, you can remove discourse_rewind_2024_dismissed from your localStorage for meta.discourse.org

I just logged in again and got the Rewind again. Didn’t change anything on the localStorage. Probably an expired session cookie? Probably should be a flag in the DB…

This was just a quick experimental possibly throw-away project (though I hope we continue to do it). So yes, probably should be in the DB, but it is not. If you log out and back in, it also triggers the Rewind to happen. It’s something we will take a look at.

Why are bubbles blinking around my avatar?

Product Support

KhoiUSA January 21, 2025, 10:16pm 3

That’s probably related to this: Discourse Rewind 2024

Topic		Replies	Views
Custom notifications on avatar effects Product Support	3	154	January 24, 2025
Discourse Rewind Plugin official , included-in-core , rewind	37	2570	January 30, 2026
Discourse Rewind 2024 Community Building rewind	16	1193	April 11, 2025
Degauss your screens, Discourse Rewind 2025 is here :floppy_disk: Announcements rewind	63	3046	January 19, 2026
Quick question about the "Powered by Discourse" badge Product Support	18	608	June 22, 2026

Why are bubbles blinking around my avatar?

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