Keep your Beacon from going stale
Your Beacon carries a quiet line saying how recently its figure changed. That line gets less confident as it ages, deliberately, so that it can never claim more than it knows.
What the marker says, and when
| Age | It reads | What it has dropped |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 2 days | Updates automatically · updated 2 hours ago | Nothing - this is the full signal. |
| Up to 30 days | Updated 10 days ago | The claim about the mechanism. It states the plain fact and lets the reader judge. |
| Over 30 days | Last updated on 15 Jun 2026 | Any claim to liveness, and the relative phrasing with it. An absolute date is harder to skim past. |
| Never published | Nothing at all | Everything. No claim beats a false one. |
The oldest tier still shows the date rather than hiding it. Suppressing it would make a six-week-old Beacon look identical to one updated an hour ago, which is the same overstatement arrived at by omission.
“Updates automatically” is only said when it is true
That first line makes a claim about a mechanism, and it appears only if at least one of your automation switches is actually on. With all four off, your Beacon moves solely when you press Update Beacon, so the fresh tier drops to a plain “Updated 2 hours ago”.
This is the one place the marker could have flattered you while still being technically accurate, and it does not.
It says “updated”, never “verified”
The timestamp behind all of this means last recomputed and changed - never last checked. A nightly recompute that found nothing new leaves it exactly where it was.
So the wording is always “updated”. It is tempting to read a daily recompute as licence to say “verified today”, and that is precisely the overstatement being refused: a Beacon whose owner has automation switched off is indistinguishable, from the timestamp alone, from one whose situation genuinely has not moved.
The consequence for you: republishing an unchanged Beacon does not refresh the marker. If nothing about your workload has moved, the line keeps ageing however many times the recompute runs - which is what makes it worth reading.
You are warned before your readers notice
The same 30-day boundary drives a warning on your own dashboard, from the same single calculation. It is therefore not possible for you to be told “your Beacon hasn’t changed in 30 days” while your Beacon is telling visitors it is live.
There is an email version of the same nudge, and you can switch it off - see Choose what you are emailed about. Switching it off silences the email, not the marker.
How precise it is, and where it does not appear
- Whole hours at finest. The public value is deliberately coarse - a minute-precise timestamp would publish when you work, including at odd hours. The exact time is not merely unshown; it does not leave the server.
- Not while you are away. An away Beacon reads no snapshot, so there is no honest freshness to state and the line is absent entirely.
- Not on the badge. The embeddable pill is deliberately minimal and carries no freshness phrase. If it matters, link to the page.
Keeping it current
Press Update Beacon whenever your workload genuinely changes, or let the automation do it - see Republish automatically. Either way, the marker reflects reality rather than effort: it is a record of your Beacon changing, not of you visiting the app.