Whatever changes made problematically to JoranConfigurator prior to loading the configuration are being ignored by the re-configuration introduced in the "scan" feature.

The code at ReconfigureOnChangeTask creates a new configurator and also resets the context, which may contain some desired settings for the configurations - say, substitution properties discovered only at runtime.

The official documentation clearly states that modifying the configurator manually is a valid way to go with, so this is why this is considered a bug IMHO.

I'm seeing multiple issues which are most likely related to this problem: LOGBACK-485, LOGBACK-592, LOGBACK-1059.

I ended up dumping the scan feature and implementing it on my own using Java's WatchService (LOGBACK-1073).