What the Board Does on Its Own
Rotation, scrolling, language changes and data refresh — everything that moves on a screen without anyone touching it, and where each of those settings lives.
What the Board Does on Its Own
A flight board in a lobby is unattended by definition. It alternates between departures and arrivals, scrolls through long lists, drops in your own slides, changes language and fetches fresh flight data — all without anyone standing in front of it. This article explains each of those movements: what triggers it, how fast it happens, and which setting turns it off.
Every screen is configured separately
There is no single settings page that governs all your boards. Each screen carries its own configuration, and you edit it under Portal → Displays, then open the screen you want. The editor has six tabs — General, Appearance, Behavior, Content, White-Label and Preview & URL — and the settings described here are spread across the first three.
Changes stay in your browser until you press Save. If you try to leave with edits pending, the editor tells you that you have unsaved changes and offers to discard them. Only one setting still belongs to the whole account rather than to a single screen, and that is the data refresh interval, because it comes from your plan.
If you want a tour of the editor itself rather than of the behaviour it controls, read The display editor.
How often flight data refreshes
The refresh interval decides how often a board asks our API for new flight data. It is set by your subscription plan and cannot be changed on a screen or in a form:
The board polls on that rhythm on its own, so a gate change appears on a Premium screen within five minutes and on a Basic screen within the hour. If you need faster updates, the only lever is the plan — see Upgrade or Downgrade Plan. Because the interval is tied to the account, every screen you run refreshes at the same rate.
Direction, columns and rotation belong together
The three settings under Appearance → What the board shows overlap, which is why the editor keeps them in one section. Changing one changes what the other two can do.
Shows picks the direction: departures only, arrivals only, or both. A newly created screen starts on departures.
Columns picks the layout. One column is available on every plan, two columns require Pro, three columns require Premium.
Auto-rotate flights (Departures ↔ Arrivals) is a switch of its own, and it is on for a new screen. While it is on, the board alternates between a departures view and an arrivals view by itself, which means it overrides the direction you picked under *Shows* and disables the per-column assignment on two- and three-column layouts. The editor says so where it happens and offers a Switch rotation off button next to the explanation, so you do not have to hunt for the cause.
Turn auto-rotate off when you want a fixed board — one direction that never changes, or a two-column layout where you decide that column one is departures and column two is arrivals.
Your own slides in the cycle
The second switch, Own slides under Appearance → Your own slides, decides whether the slides you write appear between the flights. It requires Pro or higher: Basic has no info slides, Pro allows up to five, Premium is not limited in practice.
The two switches are independent, and the board runs its carousel if either one is on. What the cycle looks like follows directly from that:
Show flights for controls how long each flight phase lasts. It only appears once one of the two switches is on, accepts anything from 5 to 300 seconds, and is 120 seconds for a screen you have not touched.
How long each slide stays up is not set here. Every slide carries its own duration, ten seconds unless you change it, and you set it where you write the slide under Portal → Content. New slides pick up the Default Slide Duration from the editor's Content tab. The running order under Portal → Content shows the slides in the sequence and with the total length a guest actually sees, calculated the same way the board calculates it — see The running order.
The tab strip and the 30-second switch
There is a second, older way the board can alternate between departures and arrivals, and it only appears in one specific case: auto-rotate off, own slides off, direction set to both, and a single-column layout. Then the board renders a Departures / Arrivals tab strip and switches between the two every 30 seconds.
Those 30 seconds are fixed in the code and there is no setting for them. The tabs themselves are ordinary buttons and stay clickable on every device, including a TV. Tapping one switches the view immediately, but it does not pause anything: the timer keeps running underneath and will move the board again at its next tick. Treat the tabs as a way to glance at the other direction, not as a way to hold a view.
If you want a direction to stay put, set Shows to departures or arrivals rather than fighting the timer.
Device mode: TV, touch or website
Under General → This screen, the Device setting decides which features the screen has at all, and it changes behaviour more than any single toggle.
TV Display is for a panel on a wall that nobody touches. Nothing pauses on interaction, and the search field is not available — a television has nothing to type on, so the editor disables the switch and says why.
Touch Screen is for an interactive panel. Any touch, scroll or key press pauses auto-scroll and rotation for 30 seconds, so a guest reading a list is not carried away mid-sentence, and search can be switched on.
Website Widget is for embedding the board on your own site. Mouse movement pauses it the same way, and rotation, own slides and auto-scroll are switched off entirely in this mode regardless of what the toggles say.
Auto-scroll through long lists
A single-column board shows twelve flights at a time. At a busy airport there are more, and Behavior → Auto Scroll is what gets a guest to the rest of them. It is on by default and unavailable in website mode.
Two settings shape it. Scroll Speed runs from very slow to very fast on a five-step scale and sits on the second step unless you move it. Pause at Start/End is how long the list rests at the top before it starts scrolling again, thirty seconds by default, and anything from zero to 300 seconds.
For boards with more than twelve flights, auto-scroll matters far more than the tab switch, because it is the only thing that shows a guest a flight that did not fit on the first screen.
Language rotation
Under Behavior → Language Settings you choose which languages the board labels itself in. Basic covers one language at a time, Pro covers two, Premium covers all of them. As soon as more than one is selected, the board rotates through them, and Language Switch Interval sets how long each one stays up: 60 seconds unless you change it, and anywhere from 10 to 600 seconds.
The language details, including what actually gets translated, are covered in Set Up Languages and Weather Widget.
Settings reach the screen by themselves
You do not need to walk to the lobby and press F5. A running board re-fetches its configuration every 20 seconds, so a change you save in the portal appears within about that long. On top of that, saving broadcasts a message that tells any board belonging to the same screen or hotel to reload completely, which is the most reliable way to pick up new branding or a new template on a kiosk device.
Pressing F5 works too, and is the fastest way to force the point if you are standing in front of the screen anyway.
The preview is deliberately still
The Preview & URL tab shows the board as it will look, and preview URLs carry ?preview=1. That parameter switches rotation, own slides, auto-scroll and language switching off, and it suppresses the heartbeat the board normally sends.
Both parts are on purpose. A still frame shows you what the screen shows without six animating thumbnails re-rendering in the background, and a preview that stayed silent about its own existence is the only way the online status next to it can stay honest — otherwise opening the editor would report a dark panel in the lobby as online.
The preview requires the screen to be active. A deactivated screen has to be activated before you can open it.
Those are the only two query parameters the display route reads. There is no parameter that overrides the refresh interval, locks a tab or disables rotation; anything of that shape you may have seen written down does nothing.
When the connection drops
If the browser loses its network, or a configuration request fails, the board shows a small orange Offline Mode badge in the top corner and keeps displaying the last flight data it received. That data lives in memory only. Nothing is stored on the device — there is no local cache and no service worker on the display — so reloading a board while it is offline gives you a configuration error screen rather than the old flights.
The board does not stop polling while it is offline. It keeps trying on its normal interval and the badge disappears as soon as a request succeeds again.
The more useful safety net sits on our side. Every set of flight data is also kept as a stale copy for 24 hours, and if the upstream flight API is unavailable, that copy is served instead of an empty board. Flights that have already departed are filtered out before anything is sent, which matters most on Basic, where the regular data can be up to an hour old.
For the fuller picture, read Understanding Offline Mode and Caching.
Telling whether a screen is actually running
The offline badge is what a guest sees. What you see is the status in Portal → Displays, and it works differently: each screen reports in every five minutes, and a screen is only called offline after twelve minutes of silence. Twelve rather than five, because a single dropped request — a reload, a brief network blip — would otherwise report a perfectly healthy screen as down.
A screen you have deactivated is a separate state. It is not an outage, and it does not fetch flight data at all: the API deliberately returns an empty response for an inactive screen instead of spending quota on a board nobody is looking at.
More than one screen covers the status list in detail.
Frequently asked questions
Can I set the refresh interval myself?
No. It comes from your plan: 60 minutes on Basic, 30 minutes on Pro, 5 minutes on Premium.
Can I make the 30-second tab switch slower?
No, that interval is fixed. If the pace is the problem, switch auto-rotate on instead and use Show flights for, which you can set anywhere between 5 and 300 seconds.
Can I have rotation only at certain times of day?
No. Rotation is either on or off; there is no schedule.
Can two screens behave differently?
Yes. Layout, direction, rotation, slides, languages, time format, airport and branding are all set per screen. The refresh interval is the one exception, because it follows the account's plan.
Next steps
Support
If something on a board moves in a way this article does not explain, write to info@lobbyflight.com or call +43 650 753 1811. Support is available Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 CET.