Every real broker account is traded by Wildflower on your own computer. If that computer stops checking in, the account shows offline. The Wildflower Demo is different: it has no broker behind it and runs on our side, so it has nothing of yours to go offline.
Connections and the account's own page show when your computer last checked in.
What the header says
While Wildflower is starting on your computer, the header shows Connecting. That only lasts so long. If nothing is heard once the start-up time has passed, the header says when it last heard from your computer instead, and offers the Live page. A computer that has been quiet for hours is never shown as still starting.
What Wildflower tries first
Say your computer is on, but has stopped sending prices while the market is open. Wildflower does not just tell you. It asks the computer to restart Wildflower, waits, and checks again. If that fixes it, you hear nothing, because there is nothing left for you to do.
If the computer is still quiet, Wildflower tries a deeper fix. It only emails you if that does not work either. So an email about this means the automatic fixes have already been tried.
Restarting is safe with a trade open. The stop and target for anything you hold sit at your broker, not on your computer, so they keep protecting the position the whole time.
There is one time your computer will say no to a restart, on purpose. When Wildflower is still loading its price history, the computer refuses and says why. Loading takes about ten minutes, and a restart in the middle throws the load away and starts again. So waiting is faster. If the computer really is quiet, Wildflower asks again later, once loading has finished.
After a restart or an update, accounts with real money come back first (funded and live accounts), then evaluations, then practice accounts. Each catches up on today's prices from what your own computer already recorded, so a slow internet connection costs far less time.
Wildflower also needs someone signed in on that computer to start again after the computer restarts. If the machine restarts and stops at the sign-in screen, nothing more happens until someone signs in.
Fixing it yourself
If you get the email, or the computer is off rather than quiet, this part is yours, because the machine is with you. Often the cause is simple: the computer restarted overnight and Wildflower did not come back.
- Check the computer is on, awake and connected to the internet.
- Check Wildflower is running. In Bot settings, Desktop agent shows live whether your computer is connected and when it last checked in.
- If it is on and still quiet, switch it off at the plug, wait ten seconds and switch it back on. Everything starts again by itself.
Wildflower watches for this closely. It treats two cases differently: the alert is urgent while a position is open, and waits a while when the account has no open position.
While it is offline
No new trades are placed from that account. Positions already open are still protected by their stops at your broker, because those stops live at the broker, not on your computer.
What can go wrong
If you need to close everything and your computer is offline, Stop everything will say plainly that the close could not be confirmed. If that happens, close the position in your broker's own platform.