As you may or may not know, Roblox has unfortunately recently removed the ability to see a user’s “last online information”. They posted an announcement about this feature’s removal on October 28, and removed it on November 15, despite vast disapproval from the Roblox community (as seen throughout this forum thread, and in particular my post and poll, which suggested reasonable alternatives to complete removal).
As my game, “Check a User’s Last Online Information [+ More!]”, relies pretty heavily on this feature, I wanted to address some things and answer some questions that I’ve seen.
Q: What will change in the game now due to this feature’s removal?
- The game will show the user’s last known/last updated “last online” info (and if they’re currently online, it will still say that they’re online). As for what exactly I mean by this, see my answer to the next question.
- All of the other cool, useful features in my game will remain in the game! This includes: avatar/outfit checking, morphing and spawning avatars/outfits, the ability to see a user’s past usernames, a user’s total RAP (if their inventory is publicly viewable), a user’s join date, a user’s friends list, a user’s joined groups, and more!
- More updates will be coming soon - stay tuned!
Q: What do you mean by “last known/last updated” last online info?
- This is the date and time the game knows of the user last being online. From October 28 (when Roblox announced the feature’s removal) to November 15 (when the feature was actually removed), whenever you looked up a user in the game (along with all the last online info of your friend’s list), the game “saved” that last online date in order to effectively archive it so that it will be later accessible. This was an archival measure I put in place. For example, if you looked up a user on November 12 at 5 p.m., and it said that user was last online on July 2 at 3 p.m., the game will now say: “LAST ONLINE: July 2, 2024 at 3:00:00 P.M. - Currently Offline (This info was last updated on November 12, 2024 at 5:00:00 P.M.” Whenever a user looked up that same person sometime after you did (in that same time period), that “last updated” date would update to whenever that other person looked them up.
- If the user you search for now was never searched for by anyone between October 28-November 15, and the game has no saved record of this user being online after that period, then the game will say “LAST ONLINE: Offline [Due to Roblox’s removal of the current last online info feature, this info is currently unavailable for this user.]”
- While this is obviously not ideal and will mean that most people’s “last online” info will be outdated, this is the best that can be done under these complex circumstances. This mass archival was largely meant to preserve the last online info of admins and more historical users (e.g., 1x1x1x1, Roblox, builderman, Minish, david.baszucki, John Doe, etc.) so that their last known last online info will be viewable after the feature’s removal.
Q: Can/does the game ever update anyone’s last online info?
- Yes, to an extent. Here is a summary of when (and how) that happens:
– When you look a user up, if the user is currently online (which the game is able to see; it just can’t see offline users’ last online info), the game will save that last online date/time and save/update it in the database with it. Thus, if you look up “david.baszucki” and he is online, the game will save that timestamp as his “last online” info. When a user looks him up afterwards when he’s already offline, the game will say he was last online at that earlier time.
– When you join the game, the game will (1) update your own last online info as the timestamp that you enter the game, and (2) go through your friends list and see which friend(s) are online and update their last online info to the current time (basically same logic as I mentioned above).
Q: I know for a fact that this user must have been online recently, however the game shows that they were last online before that time. What’s up with that inaccuracy?
- This is because the game had no trigger to update that user’s last online info in the game’s database, and thus it did not update it. By “trigger”, I am referring to the process I mentioned in the answer to the previous question. Basically, the game will update a user’s last online info to the current time when they’re currently online AND one of these two situations occur: (1) you look them up, OR (2) you’re friends with them. If they’re offline, the game will have nothing to update the database with and will leave it as is.
Q: Why do some other last online checker games say that a user was last online at a strange recent time when they definitely weren’t?
- This is not the real last online info, but rather a fake, arbitrarily generated timestamp as confirmed by Roblox when they removed the feature. When Roblox removed this feature, they simply set everyone’s last online date as the same day/time. I’m not sure if they are still generating fake timestamps (as that was supposed to be temporary, before they start generating nothing at all), but this was worth mentioning.
Q: Can you do anything about this update and bring this feature back?
- Unfortunately, it is not possible to directly do anything about it. This feature’s removal was ultimately in the fate of Roblox’s hands, so developers and the community are not able to change anything about it, and Roblox was not convinced enough to change their minds about removing it.
- For now, the best that the game can do is to show the last known last online info, and it still has all the other useful features (with more coming in the near future). Additionally, I am testing out other features that could potentially involve “last online” info in some respect.
As always, thank you to everyone for playing my game and supporting it ever since I created it back in 2018! More cool/useful updates will be coming!
If there are any other questions/concerns about this update or if you have any other potential ideas/suggestions, please let me know.
-Alexrocks911