litphoria

I thought that recent only referred to recently edited or created, myself.

The "last active time" is usually bumped by you browsing pages. Every 15 minutes it updates your last active time to now, even if you just sit on a page and do nothing but chat for a while. Editing and creating profiles updates it. Sending a post to a standard play updates it I'm pretty sure. Not too sure about chat though.

There is a Recent list that keys off profile-edit. There is a Search on Activity with 'Recently', which is a 15-minute filter, I think. It may key off of page load, but that means you can literally be active and connected on a public chat posting constantly for over an hour, and then not show in the 'Recently' or '1-hour' Activity Searches. That has to somewhat or greatly underestimate site activity at any given time, btw, which is something that hurts the perception of how active the site is.

Cross-posted with WA on that last one.
WA, it kind of feels like it isn't as accurate now as it used to be, like something has changed. Maybe not, and I only just now noticed, I don't know. I definitely know that I can be chatting and drop off of the 'Recently' Search. (Maybe just noticed this due to sitting in chat connected to it more.) It seems like if a chat is listing a given profile as currently connected, even if not posting on that chat for more than 15 minutes, or doing anything else on the site, that should still count as 'Recently' active. But it should definitely count if adding posts to the chat.

I'm not aware of any changes to the logic that updates your last active time, but something might have broken due to unrelated changes, or the caching for that list might be a bit too aggressive. I'll take a look.

On the testing server I've made it so that posts will update the profile's last active time. I'm not sure why it wasn't there already - could have sworn I did that from the get-go.