The fact that XCF skips certain events is an important consideration in designing the user state field. In general, members should not use the user state field to communicate critical information to other members of the group, because the possibility exists that XCF might not present every user state change.

To communicate critical information to other members of the group, a member should use the XCF signaling service. XCF will either deliver messages, or provide notification that the target member or the target member's system failed. However, XCF might not deliver messages in the sequence in which they were sent. If the sequence of the messages is important, members can save the timestamp, or a sequence number, associated with each message.