Is the last seen/ last active feature of users disabled by the stack exchange website? Why so?

Question

Well, I have been inactive on the MSE for quite some time due to personal problems and as I came back I observed that earlier I could see on the profile on users that at what date and time they have been active last on MSE website.

The use of it to me was that sometimes the users answering my questions would not been seen for long time and then I would put bounty on the question if I was not able to fully understand their solution.

Also, a lot of times the questions which I had were already asked and answered on MSE and I would ask in comments when I had some questions in attempts of user or answerer. But if the user had been inactive for quite a long time I would pose a question linking that previous question as user might have deceided not to be active for a variety of reasons.

So, I think it was quite a useful feature not for just me but a lot of users.

So, why was this feature disabled?

Also, in case there are some chances that it might be re - enabled then I would like to vote positively for such a feature.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can find several places where this is discussed. The main announcement is Some changes to the profile while we make it responsive (on Meta Stack Exchange). Specifically, John Omielan's answer is about this issue and contains links to some other places where it was raised/discussed. Also if you browse the linked questions, you can find other related posts such as: Why did Stack Exchange remove the "last seen" feature?, Why are "Last seen", "xxx profile views", "Member for", and "Visited xxx days, xxx consecutive" information now missing from the Profile page?

This question on Mathematics Meta is also related: Why has the number of profile views been removed from MSE?

We can't say whether the Stack Exchange decides to bring this feature back at some point. If you read the linked discussion, you can see some arguments why it should be removed and some arguments why it would be useful to keep it.

While this feature is not available, here are some things you could use:

• You can see recent activity on the network profile and site profile of a user. But this only shows when they did some action (post, edit, comment, review, ...) - so if a user a visited site without doing any action, you won't see it from here. (I'll be using my profile as an example, but you could do the same for basically any user. The exception is that some users hide their network profile.)
• You can see the "last seen" date in the accounts tab of the network profile. However, only the day is shown here - the information shown in the user profile used to be how many minutes/hours/days ago the user was seen.
• One could also use SEDE to display the last access - but this is much less precise, since the data are only updated once a week. Here is example of such queries for a single user and for several users.
• Probably it can be displayed using API. See the corresponding API documentation. However, using the API directly does not show you the last access date in a human readable form. (See also the API documentation on dates.)
• Since it is available in API, one could use it in various userscripts. I remember seeing Jitendra Singh's answer showing how this can be done using a Code Snippet. It is based on similar post for Stack Overflow: How can we find "last seen" and "profile views" info on the profile page now that they are gone? On Stack Apps, you can find the script LegacyProfiles - Bringing back the old profile stats.

Answer 2

This feature has been brought back.