Task Image Not Working?

[Nicole-Studios]

I notice at the bottom of the footer: 

{$task_image}

From time to time when I reload/refresh the page it will actually pop up as a white square box, I'm assuming this means it's not loading. Is there something that is causing it to not load? It's quite an annoying thing to see.

[Matt]

It's meant to output a 1px transparent pixel I believe, otherwise it would break in the browser when trying to display it. You could probably try and target it with CSS to hide it if you wanted.

[Nicole-Studios]

I'll wrap it in a class, if I was to do display none would that interfere with how it works? Or should I just make it opacity 0 and height/width 0?

Also, what exactly does it do?

[Matt]

Opacity 0 would probably be better actually, browsers might not download it if it's display none.

It's a way of triggering tasks without slowing down page loads - tasks are triggered when people visit the forum, however if ran the task at the same time, the page would load very slowly for the user as it would have to wait until it finished before the page would load. The image is output by task.php, which triggers the running of the task in a way that won't slow down the page load for the user.

[Nicole-Studios]

Awesome, thanks for the clear answer!