What are Skipped Status Updates?

Skipped Status Updates is a feature designed to prevent automatic status updates from overwriting a recent, previous manual status update.

How it works

When you use Automatic Status Updates (such as Geofences, Beacons, Networks, or Desktop Presence), your status is updated when you enter/exit a specified region or start/stop using your computer.  The Skipped Status Update is a feature that will prevent an automatic status update from overwriting your current status if the new status update matches your recent status update.

If you have a manual status update and your next status update is an automatic status update within 2 hours of the manual status update with the same status as before, the new update will be skipped.

Example

Let's say you are currently IN the office.  It is lunch time and you are going to go down the street to your favorite restaurant.  Before you leave the office, you want to let everyone know where you will be and when you will be back.  You update your status to 'OUT - Lunch at Bob's Burgers, back at 2 PM'.  Your status update is submitted and everyone knows exactly where you are and when you will be back.  Now that your status is updated, you leave the office.  As you leave the office, your Geofence goes to check you OUT.  Typically, the Geofence would update your status to 'OUT - Left the office' but because of Skipped Status Updates, it will ignore the status update recognizing that you were already OUT.  You will receive a notification to your phone saying 'You exited Geofence but we did not update your status because you were already out'.  If you want to overwrite your 'Lunch at Bob's Burgers, back at 2 PM' status, you can do so by pressing the notification.  In most scenarios, you will want to ignore this notification as the manual status update is much more informative to other users than the automatic status update.  When you return from lunch, your status will be automatically updated like normal to 'IN - Entered the office'.

In short, if you are currently OUT and you either exit a Geofence/Beacon/Network or your computer goes idle, any automatic OUT would be ignored.  If you are currently IN and you enter a Geofence/Beacon/Network or start using your computer, any automatic IN would also be ignored.  Automatic Status Updates will always go through when going from OUT to IN or IN to OUT.

Disabling Skipped Status Updates

Currently, you cannot disable Skipped Status Updates.  Your status updates will always get ignored if they match the previous update.  You can disable the notification that you receive but you will also stop receiving successful update notifications.