Keep a Display Running Around the Clock
How to keep the picture on a 24/7 board changing, what a screensaver or nightly restart does to the offline warning in your dashboard, and how to switch a screen off at night without leaving the portal.
Keep a Display Running Around the Clock
A lobby board runs unattended for months, and two questions come up once it has been on the wall for a while: is the picture varied enough for the panel you bought, and what happens in the portal when the screen goes dark at night. This article answers both from the LobbyFlight side. It does not tell you what to set in Android or in your kiosk browser — those settings belong to the device, not to LobbyFlight, and their manuals are the authority on them. What it does tell you is which LobbyFlight settings change what is on the glass, and how the portal interprets a screen that stops reporting.
What LobbyFlight already changes on the screen
Whether a static picture is a problem at all depends on the panel you installed; your display's manual is the place to settle that. What you can control here is how much of the picture stays put. Four things vary it, and they work independently of one another.
Rotation between departures and arrivals. Under Displays → open the screen → Appearance → What the board shows, the toggle Auto-rotate flights (Departures ↔ Arrivals) alternates the board between the two directions. It is on for new displays. With it off, the board shows one direction permanently and nothing about the layout changes on its own.
How long each view stays up. The field Show flights for sets the length of each phase in seconds. Anything from 5 to 300 seconds is accepted, and a newly created display starts at 120 seconds. The field only appears once rotation or your own slides are switched on, because with both off there is nothing to time. If the value was never set, the board falls back to 60 seconds.
Your own slides. Under Appearance → Your own slides, the Own slides toggle folds the slides you built under Content into the same cycle, each one shown for its own configured duration. This toggle needs a Pro or Premium plan; on Basic it is locked and the board rotates flights only.
Auto-scroll through the flight list. Under Displays → open the screen → Behavior, auto-scroll moves the list itself, so long flight lists keep moving even between rotation phases. It is on by default, has a speed setting, and pauses for a configurable interval after someone interacts with the screen. It is not available in website mode.
Beyond that, the flight rows themselves change whenever new data arrives, and how often that happens depends on your plan: hourly on Basic, every 30 minutes on Pro, every 5 minutes on Premium. On Basic, a quiet hour genuinely is an hour of the same rows.
Rotation does not run everywhere
Two situations stop the cycle, and both are easy to miss because nothing in the portal announces them.
In website mode, rotation and your own slides are switched off regardless of what the toggles say. A widget embedded in your own site shows one board and stays there.
In touch and website mode, any interaction — a tap, a scroll, a mouse move — pauses rotation for 30 seconds, and each further touch restarts that pause. A touch screen in a busy lobby can therefore sit on the same view for a long stretch. If varying the picture matters for your panel, a TV-mode display is the safer choice, because TV mode has no touch pause at all. The display mode sits under Displays → open the screen → General → Display Mode.
Pick a template that suits the panel
The strongest picture-side lever LobbyFlight gives you is the design template, under Displays → open the screen → Appearance → Design Template. There are eight, and they are not all dark. Modern Dark is the default and Classic Airport is black with amber type, but Minimal Light is a genuinely light theme on a near-white background — a sensible choice for a bright lobby and a different proposition for a panel whose manual warns about bright static areas. Five further templates unlock with Pro. On top of the template you can adjust the colours themselves, which is covered in Customize Colors.
If your panel's documentation asks you to keep large bright areas off the screen, choose one of the dark templates. That decision is made here, not on the device.
Screensavers, nightly restarts and the twelve-minute rule
This is the part that surprises people. A LobbyFlight display posts a heartbeat every five minutes while it is open. The portal treats a display as offline once twelve minutes have passed without one — two missed beats plus a little slack, so a single dropped request or a page reload does not raise a false alarm. When a display crosses that line, it turns dark on the screen wall on your dashboard and the dashboard raises the warning *Display "name" appears offline*, together with how long ago it was last seen.
Anything that stops the browser from running stops the heartbeat with it. That gives you a clear rule for the measures people commonly set up on the device:
Whichever you choose, decide it once and knowingly, so that nobody at the front desk spends a morning chasing a warning that your own night schedule produced.
Note also that a restart clears whatever the browser had loaded, but it does not fetch fresher flight data than your plan allows. After a restart the board fills again from the next scheduled refresh, which on Basic can be up to an hour away.
Switching a screen off at night, the built-in way
If the goal is simply that the board is not running at night, LobbyFlight has its own switch and it is better behaved than a timer on the wall socket. In the header of the display editor, next to the display's name, a button reads Active or Inactive. Switching a display to inactive stops it making API calls, which means it stops consuming your data quota as well. The preview in the Preview & URL tab then says so plainly instead of showing a live board.
This is the right tool for a screen that is genuinely out of service — a board in a room being renovated, or a second display you only run in season. It is a portal setting, so it does not switch the panel off; the hardware side is still yours to handle. But it keeps the quota and the dashboard honest in a way that pulling the plug does not.
When a screen goes dark and you did not plan it
Start with the dashboard rather than the device. The screen wall shows every display as the panel it is, and the offline warning tells you when the display was last seen. That timestamp is the most useful thing you have: a display last seen twenty minutes ago is a different problem from one last seen at 4:00 in the morning, right when your restart runs.
From there, Fix a Display That Won't Load and Display Freezes or Not Auto-Refreshing cover the causes worth checking. If the display was never opened at all, the portal reports that separately and raises no warning, because it is a setup step rather than an outage — the URL and QR code for it live in the Preview & URL tab.