FAQs - Amboss

General Questions
What does Amboss mean?
"Amboss" is the German word for "anvil". It can be thought of as a robust platform for lightning work.
How can I use Amboss privately?
While Amboss Space is a social platform, all information displayed is either public information or information volunteered by users. Contacting your peers is very important for node operators, but sometimes contact information that can be linked to a users real-world identity. If you want to keep your node activities separate from your real-world identity, consider providing an email address that isn't associated with any other information (i.e. a "burner" email). 
To help keep your contact information hidden from spammers or users that are not logged in, change the Contact Info Privacy setting to "Make Private" in the Account Info settings.
To keep your bitcoin-related activities private from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), consider using Tor or a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that is trustworthy.
What are disabled channels?
Disabled channels are lightning channels that can't be used for routing while their status has been changed to disabled. Users running LND 0.13+ can temporarily modify the status of their channels using lncli updatechanstatus using the channel point and the new status (enable, disable, or auto).
Channels can be disabled in only one direction (just like closing a road to traffic in one direction). Using the disabled channel status may reduce the amount of routing failures that other nodes experience when pathfinding, which may improve some rankings for your node, depending on the ranking methodology. Disabled channels may be re-enabled at a future date.
Network Gossip Issues
Why is my node not showing up in Amboss?
Amboss uses information derived from "gossip" between nodes. New nodes or nodes without public channels aren't announced to the network immediately. Once a node has public channels, the information about the new node is propagated through the network, which may take several days.
Why can't I log in to Amboss?
Only nodes that Amboss can "see" will be able to log in successfully. If your node can be found in search, Amboss can see your node. Otherwise, see why-is-my-node-not-showing-up-in-amboss. For additional help see our Login help page:
👋
Login
Why are my closed channels not disappearing?
Amboss uses several nodes to provide information to the Amboss database of information. As these nodes receive network information, the data displays on Amboss Space get updated throughout the day.
At our current stage of development, we are not monitoring the blockchain, which would inform us more immediately of a channel close.
To manually check whether a node has closed channels, click this button located between the capacity map and the channels table:
. This button will show for all logged in users.
While we plan to make improvements in development and infrastructure to make Amboss very responsive to Network Graph changes with additional listening nodes, we appreciate your patience as we catch up to the explosive growth of the Lightning Network.
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Outline

General Questions

What does Amboss mean?

How can I use Amboss privately?

What are disabled channels?

Network Gossip Issues

Why is my node not showing up in Amboss?

Why can't I log in to Amboss?

Why are my closed channels not disappearing?