I’m working on some integrations with ifttt (first time using that as well) and my recipe to notify me when devices go offline never sent a text. I confirmed ifttt could text me and then looked into the particle dashboard on my phone and saw that a xenon that was defi9 unplugged hours before was showing up with its glowy blue indicator like it was still online. If the particle system wasn’t recording the device as offline, the rest of what was going on makes sense.
Has anyone else experienced this anomoly with devices not showing as offline when they actually were?
The Electron, E Series, Argon, Boron, and Xenon will never show offline in IFFFT.
These devices don’t have a TCP connection to the device cloud like the Photon, P1, and Core did, and there can be as much as a 23 minute gap where the cloud has no idea if the device is really online or not. Since the gap is so large as to make the feature kind of useless, the online indication is just never updated at this time.
In the future it could be made a bit better, and this may be done, but not in the near future.
If you really need to know if the device is online or not, it’s best to periodically publish from the device and note when it stops publishing.
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So you added an indication on a web page that doesn’t actually indicate anything and, in fact, can be terribly misleading.
Perhaps you want to rethink that approach…
Actually no.
The indicator was there before any UDP based devices had been developed and back at that time when only connection-bound TCP cloud communication allowed for a (mostly) correct status report the intended behaviour was actually given.
But the functionality of that indicator was overtaken by development. Originally Electrons were also using TCP but it soon became clear that that would consume too much data and hence the decision to move over to UDP was made but the indicator was just not following along as there were plenty more pressing features to fix, add and enhance.
History tells us - to understand the present one needs to understand the past before jumping to conclusions.
That might perhaps be something to rethink 
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Point taken. But whether they “added” it for the new device types or “left it there” from past device types, the result is the same… A new device type was introduced, and the indicator showing it’s still communicating properly with the network is there on the screen, but is useless for this device type.
Or, am I misunderstanding the previous message about this indicator? Is it not always pulsing?
The problem is that UDP doesn’t lend itself to such an indicator and introducing extra data traffic by regularly pinging just for that may not be beneficial to everyone.
As I understand it Particle is still trying to figure out how to find the sweet spot.
One option may be an opt-in to conciously/deliberately trade extra data usage for a more reliable indicator when needed.
Another option - that everybody has already - is to regularly push some data to the cloud which can be used as personal replacement of that indicator (that’s what some product creators have already opted for).
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Sorry, I lost track of the email notification for this. Thanks for the replies everyone. It makes a lot more sense now what is going on. I’m quite new to the particle platform but the inevitability of using it a whole bunch is definitely creeping up on me (actually bought a wifi connected Canbus scanner for my car and it turned out to be a photon with an adapter!).
Thanks all.