brainiac wrote:
OK - I will look into this next. Can you clarify how it should work? Is it when you visit a thread that it STOPS sending notifications, or is it when you visit the site at all. Personally I would like to see a more explicit way to subscribe to a thread, as someone mentioned above. Someone shouldn't have to post in order to subscribe. We would record whether you are subscribed, and the date/time of your last visit to the thread. Then you would get one notification when a thread grew after a visit. Does that make sense?
It is thread specific. When you contribute to a thread, there is a check box for email notification. It then notifies you of new responses in the thread with a link to it. You only receive one notification for that thread until your next visit to the thread, which resets the "counter" and alerts you to new messages after your last visit. At least that's how it used to work.
While we're at it. It would be great to add the option for email notification without having to add comments to the discussion. Also an option to remove yourself from being notified. Currently there is no way that I know of to do that. Maybe add the two buttons next to the New Topic, New Poll, and Post Reply buttons that are located at the top and bottom of each page.
And as someone else stated, now I get alerts when I reply in a thread. It didn't behave this way before the updates.
pgengler wrote:
I've noticed that for threads that have multiple pages, there aren't links to the pages on the forum page anymore. For example, in the City, Still life & Abstract forum, the "Mustang Air to Air 'The Sequel'" thread has 22 pages, but no page links when you view that forum. This thread here is another example.
My inbox has also been getting flooded with "1-for-1" notifications as well.
Please hold off on comments on this bug now. Generally please be sure to read this thread so as not to post too many repeat bug reports. Fred and I have work enough as it is without reading about the same bug repeatedly. If someone has already reported a bug here, then we will be aware of it soon if not already. Even if we don't seem to be doing much about it, duplicate reports are as likely to slow down a fix as accelerate one. If you can add something about the bug that hasn't been said, then go ahead, but try not to duplicate. Thanks all.
OK - I have rewritten the notification code so that it is much more efficient than it was. I hope it's working OK now. Can anyone confirm whether it is doing what it should? One thing I am aware of is that the state of the notification checkbox may or may not be sticky - that's not rewritten yet, but will be shortly. I am going to use a cookie to remember the state of notification per topic. That means that you could see a different default from one computer to another. Although that's not ideal, it does allow the server to forget whether you were ever a subscriber in the past, and that leads to efficiency when you have thousands of users on thousands of threads.
On using cookies for thread post notices, I'm not sure how that can work for us. The server has to know to send emails even if we're offline, doesn't it? So if I'm not logged into the forum, how would the server know to send me an email? Or did I miss something in your above post?
Plus for security & privacy, most astute users have their browsers set to remove all but locked/protected cookies everytime they close their browser. btw we strongly recommend that as part of any user's basic security and privacy handling. Most of us "tolerate cookies" begrudgingly.
brainiac wrote:
You may need to enable javascript.
Ah, that did it. I'd set my browser to disable JS for this site because of the tab problem (page opening in a new table & the current one) but since that seems to be fixed now I can enable it.
Rodney O wrote:
On using cookies for thread post notices, I'm not sure how that can work for us. The server has to know to send emails even if we're offline, doesn't it? So if I'm not logged into the forum, how would the server know to send me an email? Or did I miss something in your above post?
I am not very good at explaining myself. Previously the server stored 2 data: whether you currently needed notifying, and whether you had ever needed notifying. That allowed it to notify, but also set the default on the notification checkbox even if you no longer needed notifying because you had already been notified. The way I see it, and I am a stickler for getting the 3GHz beast on the site visitor's desk to accept as much of the workload as possible, the task of remembering whether you want generally to be notified about a thread can rightly be done by your computer, the visitor's. If you use 2 computers then it won't kill you to set it on both. The server must indeed remember whether you need notifying, but once it has notified you, why not forget it, and make the site a bit faster, and backups a bit smaller?
> Plus for security & privacy, most astute users have their browsers set to remove all but locked/protected cookies everytime they close their browser.
In my view, the less than astute ones, actually. Cookies are fine. No browser should share cookies with other sites, and generally they don't. You are far more spied on by installing Windows or Office. If people stop using Windows, then they are in a position to worry about a tiny fragment of non-executable text that this server saves on their machine and can't be accessed by other servers, and would be of little interest if it were. There are problems with some cookies issued by this site, but I didn't write that code, and nothing in a cookie which remembers whether you are subscribed to a particular thread could be considered much of a security risk.
>btw we strongly recommend that as part of any user's basic security and privacy handling. Most of us "tolerate cookies" begrudgingly.
Honestly, the day everyone wipes her hard drive and installs OpenBSD is the day I take this kind of Microsoft security FUD seriously. Think about it, what kind of private information about you can a site store in a cookie? Only what you are prepared to type in to a form in their website. Privacy? If this cookie is a problem then you have shown that you already don't care about it.
pgengler wrote:
I'd set my browser to disable JS for this site because of the tab problem (page opening in a new table & the current one) but since that seems to be fixed now I can enable it.
...er, I haven't fixed that yet. Maybe Fred did it.
brainiac wrote:
OK - I have rewritten the notification code so that it is much more efficient than it was. I hope it's working OK now. Can anyone confirm whether it is doing what it should? One thing I am aware of is that the state of the notification checkbox may or may not be sticky - that's not rewritten yet, but will be shortly. I am going to use a cookie to remember the state of notification per topic. That means that you could see a different default from one computer to another. Although that's not ideal, it does allow the server to forget whether you were ever a subscriber in the past, and that leads to efficiency when you have thousands of users on thousands of threads....Show more →
BTW, you got me thinking about the significance of that single datum. With 165,000 users and over half a million threads, potentially, if the db is clever enough to use a bit rather than a byte for a bit field, we could need to store 87450 million bits. Actually I think, the db tends to use bytes instead of bits due to operating system constraints, so we could be storing 87 gigabytes of knowledge about who is subscribed to which thread. Of course, that is the worst possible case where everyone is interested in every thread, but at least that kind of sum gives an insight into what is meant by 'scalable'. I try to write stuff that works OK even after massive growth, and removing unnecessary database fields is a good policy. Save the pennies and the pounds look after themselves.
I don't see the mail function getting called multiple times. Is there a chance that those 5 notifications happened before I fixed the code just now? What times are on them?
brainiac wrote:
I don't see the mail function getting called multiple times. Is there a chance that those 5 notifications happened before I fixed the code just now? What times are on them?
11:45, 11:56, 12:07, 12:13, 12:14, (I think I visited the thread in between these times) 12:43, 12:44, 12:50, 12:52
I am still not seeing the mail sender repeat itself unnecessarily. Is anyone still getting too many notifications? Are they exact duplicates of each other, i.e. were they sent at exactly the same time?
fwiw I haven't gotten any email notifications since 11:45am Do we now need to check the notofy box everytiem we post in a thread? Didn't think that was needed before?
I have 17 notifications for the same thread. Last two were received in the last 20 minutes. Each time stamp seems to correlate with each new message that was posted in the thread.
I can appreciate your desire to make the servers work as efficiently as possible and your view that users desktop should share some of the work load, but it seems other forums handle this feature and do not get bogged down. How are they handling this functionality?
Personally I use up to 5 devices including desktop, laptop, thin client, PDA, to access the internet. counting solely on cookies at each machine to keep track of my settings would cause a lot of grief, which also goes counter to the whole concept of "access everywhere from any terminal", which I see as the direction online resources are going.
AJ Nadershahi wrote:
I use up to 5 devices including desktop, laptop, thin client, PDA, to access the internet. counting solely on cookies at each machine to keep track of my settings would cause a lot of grief...
That is a sound argument. I will instead put a flag in the db.
Rodney O wrote:
fwiw I haven't gotten any email notifications since 11:45am Do we now need to check the notofy box everytiem we post in a thread? Didn't think that was needed before?
I don't think that has changed. The quick reply box at the bottom has notify always off, as it always did, while if you hit the reply button you should see the checkbox set according to your last use.
BTW AJ, I see from my log that you just got a notify for the message I wrote after yours. That is correct behaviour, as I understand it. Every time you visit a thread, notify gets set to on if you previously chose notify when posting on that thread. If you post again with notify off, then you won't get any more notifications. Isn't that how it's meant to work?
Do we now need to check the notofy box everytiem we post in a thread? Didn't think that was needed before?