Alerts Help

[FrizzleFried]

The continual drone of how bad the Alerts system works is driving me crazy.  Why are some of my members getting alerts 3 day later when they've been active for all 3 of those days?

It's nuts.  I added some code to call some file every minute via a cron job and it has not fixed the issue (yes,  I spelled it cron not chron).

What is going on with these alerts that they are so off-timed?!?

I think my users are spoiled because we had the SMF Packs alert system in 2.0.x and it was rock solid.

They use ajax to check on alerts every x number of seconds.

Is there a way to disable the alert system?  This is driving me crazy.  I have at least 3 or 4 people ******ing about it daily.. and I have to admit,  after really paying attention... yeah,  it's not good.

[FrizzleFried]

Just happened to me.  I was just dropped 3 alerts in a row from 7:20 to 8:30PM last night.  I was on my forum working on it at least until midnight.

Again... i do have the CRON.PHP being hit once a minute.

Also,  I just checked and I don't see any way to simply remove alerts.

...and this was the last PM sent to me.

Jon,  the entire purpose of an alerts system is thrown out the window if it can't deliver the alert in a timely fashion.  You should just remove the system if you can't get it to work right.

EDIT: Sorry guys... I'm a little bit of a Debbie Downer on this as I thought we'd fixed this with the Cron job that I set up a couple days ago... but yeah,  a PM and multiple complaints on the dedicated UPDATE thread says otherwise.

I'm learning that patience & users go together like patience & toddler.

[Arantor]

We never actually looked at what the alerts *are*. Are they likes, are they "you've been quoted", new reply in the topic?

If the system were as bad as you're saying we would have noticed it here on this site which is operating at higher load than most SMF sites - and they've not misbehaved like that.

[FrizzleFried]

Quote notifications aren't alerting on time...

Yesterday at 08:35:18 PM
Quote from: bottlejunkie on March 25, 2022, 09:18:13 PM
I don't get it, I mean. I get it but to be honest I checked KLOV in the morning with coffee BUT THEN aha WAS FIRST BUT BOTH WAS DAILY for a long time,
I literally JUST got a notification for this quote. Alerts are working fine |AHA|

Note that yesterday at 8:35PM (March 27th) she got an alert for a quote from 9:18PM on March 25th.  This woman had logged in multiple times on the 25th after 9pm,  multiple times on the 26th,  and multiple times on the 27th.... when all of a sudden at 8:35PM she got the quote alert.

PERSONALLY,  the 3 alerts that popped up today for me (that were supposed to be generated yesterday early evening) are add-on alerts for the SMF-HACKS Awesome Post Ratings mod... which you have no control over of course... but it's not just those (for sure).


EDIT: To be clear,  when she says "Alerts are working fine" ... the smiley tag at the end there is a "GIVE ME A BREAK" type of smiley.  That was a smar-arce comment.  Alerts are not working fine unfortunately.

[Arantor]

That's really not what it says.

The date/time on the quote is when the original post was made. NOT when the quoting act was carried out. The date/time on the quote is how SMF has always worked, to cite the time of the original post.

Example. It is 14:08 my time as I write this post, here I am quoting the first part of your post, that is from 12:51 my time. What does it tell you, exactly?

The continual drone of how bad the Alerts system works is driving me crazy.

[Kindred]

I can not recreate any of the problems you are mentioning, Frizzle...    both here on Simplemachines.org and on my test site, alerts seem to happen within a reasonable time frame -- heck, my test site is barely touched by any users other then me and search engines -- and I still get alerts in a reasonable timeframe (within the hour, if not even sooner)

[Doug Heffernan]

I can not reproduce this type of delay with alerts either. What browser are you and your users using @FrizzleFried? The one who are experiencing that kind of delay I mean.

[FrizzleFried]

That's really not what it says.

The date/time on the quote is when the original post was made. NOT when the quoting act was carried out. The date/time on the quote is how SMF has always worked, to cite the time of the original post.

Example. It is 14:08 my time as I write this post, here I am quoting the first part of your post, that is from 12:51 my time. What does it tell you, exactly?

The continual drone of how bad the Alerts system works is driving me crazy.

I explained the situation.  TRUST ME... there will be some evidence from the members I am sure of it that I will post back.

NOW MY EVIDENCE... but it's something you guys can't really say anything about because I can say FOR SURE 100% that I received this morning alerts for ratings (SMF Hacks Awesome Ratings Mod) that have a time stamp of yesterday between 7 and 9pm ... and I was on my site until about 11pm messing with it...

I dunno.  I'll keep trying to keep track but man I have much better things to do but they wont stop with the complaints (meaning SOMETHING is wrong or different vs the other alerts mod enough to warrant it).



FWIW the other alerts mod was instantaneous.  1 second and the alert popped up.  Every time.  All the time.

[FrizzleFried]

Wait. I just followed that quote link and the quote WAS generated on March 25th... a little later but it WAS MARCH 25th.  It should have alerted on March 25th...not yesterday (March 27th) at 8:35 right before the lady posted that it was not working.  She had been online plenty of times between March 25th when the quote was created (and should have been alerted) and the 27th at 8:35pm (or right before).

It's broke over here... and I don't know why or how.

My moderator just posted a TEST POST.  I quoted it.  I rated it.  I am waiting for him to reply as to when he receives the alert.

EDIT: NOTE - He is on mobile.  I can also provide images he's posting on the matter if necessary.

FWIW,  he said he'd reply when he got the alert.  He's not replied yet.  It SHOULD have been within 1 second based on the fact I'm running cron.php every second... no?

[Arantor]

The other alerts system is significantly more load on the server. It would literally have never been approved for this site. Specifically when we sat and evaluated it, we figured this site would have needed another 2 servers *just* to cope with the alerts handling in that case. Which is why it runs the way it does, to not need a super beefy server.

In any case I continue to believe there is a misunderstanding about how it works, not that it is not working correctly.

I'm not at my dev environment right now so I can't write the query but the next step is to query the database to look at notifications triggered by messages and what time the alert was triggered vs what time the message was created.

Also, every second? WTF? We said every minute.

[FrizzleFried]

I've created a dedicated thread to test... Thus far one person (one of my moderators) tested and received an alert for "quote" "mention" and SMFHACK's rating system within a timely fashion (he admits to not paying attention for a number of minutes then they were there).

I've asked everyone who is complaining to please participate by responding.  I will then quote,  mention,  and rate each to see the response.

That's about the best I can do I think...

[FrizzleFried]

Can someone explain exactly how "Timeout for Alert desktop notifications" works so that I can instruct my users.  I suspect some are running in to THAT issue.

I just had this posted:

So one thing I noticed that might be related...if I look at my alerts right now, it only shows 3 alerts. And most of them are pretty old. But if I clock on "all alerts" to see the full list, then it shows me a ton of them including very recent ones that did not show up otherwise.

Also:

Here is what I mean:

Clicking the bell only shows 3 alerts. Only two of which are from yesterday.

You cannot view this attachment.


But clicking on All Alerts shows that I clearly had a lot more than that yesterday:


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Next guy (same guy as above) claims...

Neither of them added to the count under the bell or showed up. But they both show up if I click "All Alerts".

...I'd quoted the post I quoted above and and mentioned him. 

[Arantor]

The popup's number shows *unread* alerts. The alerts page shows *all alerts*. The "mark unread" is not super clear that it's offering to make an alert unread.

What can also happen is that if you view a topic where you received an alert about it, even if you didn't go to that alert specifically it can be marked read for you.

[FrizzleFried]

I don't think I am explaining correctly.

Someone can get 10 alerts.  Only 3 will show on the index... then when all alerts is clicked all 10 show (and then some).

Here is the next user complaining about the very same thing.

Another users test...

All morning (my day starts at 5am), I had no Alerts.

When I came back after my last post in this thread, I had 2 Alerts (I just typed in 'www.aha-forums.com' to get here), but there were 4 Alerts in the drop down.

As soon as I clicked 'Unread Posts', the Alerts number jumped to 4, and it was the same alerts in the drop down.

Note that one alert is from yesterday, and I didn't see it yesterday or today until I got alerts from this thread.

You cannot view this attachment. You cannot view this attachment.


I just can't this is working right when so many people are having so many issues.

There is no reason why you should have 10 new alerts... and only 3 show up on the (3) tag...

How can I set things so that if someone gets 10 alerts... it shows (10)?

I still don't understand how someone can get 2 alerts... they NOT show up at all in the (#) part up top and then they DO show up in the all alerts.  Those two alerts never alerted???

[FrizzleFried]

What can also happen is that if you view a topic where you received an alert about it, even if you didn't go to that alert specifically it can be marked read for you.

This is a logical explanation. I've mentioned it to the user.  I am waiting to see if he says he came in the thread at any time before he noticed the alert in the ALL ALERTS section.

[Arantor]

I understood you just fine.

The alerts drop down menu shows the alerts that you have not yet read. The alerts page in profile shows all your alerts, even if you have read them.

By "read" I mean you have either explicitly clicked on them to go to the content they're about (e.g. a post of yours is liked, you click on it to see the post = mark the "your post was liked" alert read), or you have gone to the topic in question (a post of yours was quoted, you went to the topic anyway, no need to alert you further that you were quoted)

Does the fact that the full alerts (all alerts) page say "mark read" for some and "mark unread" for others not clarify that there is something different about them?

As for the 2 vs 4 mismatch, there were 2 alerts you hadn't read at the point the page was loaded. When the drop down was opened, the live list of alerts was loaded and two more had come in, this is not live updated to avoid putting strain in the server.

Honestly, at this point just get Nibogo to update his mod for 2.1, your users will never be satisfied with what 2.1 offers out of the box precisely because it's designed to not impact servers with live updates.

I wish I'd never designed this damn thing at this point.

[FrizzleFried]

I suspect we may have determined part (if not all) of the issue.


We were not aware that if you have X number of alerts up top... and you visit the thread where those alerts were generated (without clicking anything to do with the alerts)... it makes those alerts up top disappear.

THAT is the primary confusion I suspect.

Is there any way to STOP that behavior?  The alerts should remain NEW ALERTS until you actually click on them.  Just because someone visits a thread doesn't mean they are aware they were quoted...or mentioned... or rated.   Alerts up top should remain until either (a) they time out (whatever that is...time or number of alerts... I am still not sure) or (b) they are clicked on.

Is there any way to make the system behave in that fashion?

[Arantor]

Not without changing the code, and it isn't the whole thread (or shouldn't be), just for the page you're on, on the assumption that if you visit page 2 of a thread and you're quoted in page 2, you will likely see it there.

[FrizzleFried]

Well... I wish that misunderstanding of how things work now (vs the other alerts system) was the whole of the complaints.  It's not (thought it may be a big chunk).  Still compiling.

>sigh<

[Arantor]

You mean the others like Facebook and XenForo that work the same way?