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Alerts Help

Started by FrizzleFried, March 28, 2022, 07:51:43 AM

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FrizzleFried

For transparency purposes...

@Kindred

... exactly how many people have to complain about any particular "issue" with SMF before the team ... re-evaluates their current stance on that particular "issue"? 

Mind you,  I'm not declaring things are broken... on the contrary,  you've made it very clear (on more than one occasion) that the core product is NOT broken... I'm just curious as to how concrete that determination is?  "Is there any flexibility in regards to these things?",  I guess is the ultimate question...

Arantor

I've seen it too, I can even give you theories as to why it is so. Very easy to produce if you use multiple tabs.

You know what's funny? Other systems at the time *behaved similarly*. Solutions involving message buses to update such things across tabs weren't really a concept 10 years ago because opening 5 tabs generated 5x the traffic to the server so we didn't (because we didn't have things like localStorage to share between tabs)

Now, if we'd released this in 2013 when it was written, this wouldn't be nearly so bad as it is today because everyone's expectations moved.

I reiterate that I wish I'd never built this thing at this point.

voom

To make my last statement more specific: Likes e.G. are alerted almost instantly, it is only alerts to show that there is an answer to a post etc. that come belated and in bulks. Sometimes more than other times.

Darkness7148

Funnily enough since my reply, I now have 32 alerts in the bar.

I do love the concept of the Alerts. It is really useful on my forum for seeing posts that are relevant to you. But there does seem to be issues with it not updating sometimes.

FrizzleFried

#104
I figured I would come in and report more "intended behavior" of this system.


I came to this site.  I had an alert.  I clicked on it and it took me to the post in question.  Someone had quoted me.  Great! 

Next,  I click on UNREAD POSTS and I notice that the Alerts drop down up top still showed (1).  I click on the drop down and it's empty (at which point the 1 did disappear)...

Is this another example of 'intended behavior' for the Alerts system or is there an issue @Kindred ?

Actually... I think we should establish exactly what the INTENDED PURPOSE of the Alerts system is from the SMF Team's perspective.

Does the SMF Team consider the alerts system a useful tool or does the SMF Team consider the alerts system a fun novelty?  The current status of the alerts system sort of depends on what the teams perspective of the system is.

If the SMF Team considers the Alerts system a fun novelty,  I would agree with @Kindred ... it works as intended ... works well enough ... etc.

If the SMF Team consider the Alerts system a "useful tool" (which is my perspective).  It's simply broken in it's current form and no amount of arguing can change that fact.  So can we at least clarify where the SMF Team stands on this so I can either (A) continue pointing out the deficiencies of the "tool" in an effort that perhaps the SMF Team will improve it or (B) I can see if I can find SOMEONE to perhaps improve the system to bring it from "a fun novelty" to "a useful tool" status... (thereby giving the SMF Team guys a break on this.)

This "tool" is somewhat important to my users and I...  enough so that I paid for a similar "tool" for 2.0.x.  I would do so again however the author of that mod has decided not to implement his version for 2.1.x because it's already part of the core product.  So yeah...this is somewhat of a "big deal" in the overall scheme of things when it comes to my forum.

Thanks.

EDIT: Oh,  and when I posted on my forum that I was going to "give up" on this cause... that the "SMF Team has made it clear that the current system works 'as intended'"... this was the first response...

QuoteWay to fold!

I don't fold... ever. ;)

Arantor

I can't speak for the team, but I can speak as the person who designed this system originally.

The intent and design goals and thinking that lead to all of this:
* Alerts should tell you about things that have happened that you might be interested in, and thus should generate engagement.
* If an alert is about a post, say that it has been liked, and you have seen the post recently, the thinking was that you'd seen whatever it was you were alerted about and thus marking it read was a logical progression.
* The display of alerts was to show you things you hadn't seen yet and to focus on specifically the things you hadn't seen yet, with a way to go view the things you had previously seen.
* Alerts were always intended to be processed out of band; that is, an action that triggers an alert should not process that alert in the exact same page load, for the exact reason that existing mail notifications on a topic could sometimes break the posting of that topic because of it happening and taking too long, thus the introduction of the background queue.
* The queue processing occasionally being lumpy is not an intended goal, but an unfortunate side effect; during development it was intended that people would set up cron to run it once a minute to clear the queue ensuring they be processed reasonably promptly without affecting the user side too much in terms of making pages slow in a way users should see.
* There can be a mismatch between the number above the popup and the number of alerts; this is because the number above the popup is calculated as at the time the page is loaded, while the actual alerts *in* the popup is live. This was done as a consideration for performance to avoid putting additional strain on the server, especially as at the time cross-tab storage of information was not viable.
* Whatever the 'live notifications'/AJAX callback does every however many seconds is not part of my original design, I have no idea what it actually does, I have never enabled it. This may even be why I don't notice as many issues as other people because it functions closer to how I intended it and therefore what my own subconscious biases tell me it should be doing.

I believe that, on the surface, people would broadly agree with the *intent* and initial thinking of the above, without prior knowledge of what it would produce. Some of it was done out of guesswork about how things might work better given usage patterns and what would be realistically achievable on the servers SMF is usually installed on (which are lower-specced than things like XenForo or IPS usually get given)

I do believe that with hindsight some of this thinking was well-intentioned but incorrect, and I outlined my suggested replacement for this in this topic, namely not draining the popup on things being read (I believe the marking things read on reading them is acceptable, but them disappearing off the popup is not), and being smarter about the number actually on the popup.

The most damning thing of all, though, is to hide behind 'it's working as intended'. Now, sometimes this is a legitimate response to criticism; sometimes you design things and you have to pick a path and stick to it, with the view that you make some people happy and not others; you cannot please all of the people all of the time, and there *are* things that subjectively don't feel right to everyone. For these situations - and it's far from all of them - you can say 'working as intended' and this is legitimate. It's a cop-out, because you're saying 'good enough for me, I don't care about your needs' but it's at least not intellectually bankrupt.

Here, however, that's simply not the case. Is it working as designed? Questionably. HOWEVER: this does not address the bigger, more important question. Is it a good design? You can have things working exactly as designed, but if the design's crap, the design's crap and it doesn't *matter* if it's working as intended because if it's badly designed, how well executed it is doesn't change that. It might, at best, make a crap design less unpalatable.

As I said, I believe the theory behind the design, at the point in time when it was designed seemed like a good idea at the time. But you know what? We tried it in a real world scenario, it turns out it doesn't work as well as expected and it needs addressing. I've outlined a few thoughts, on reflection I'm going to add some more in a moment.

FrizzleFried

Arantor ... this post isn't intended for you ... but rather for the 'team'.  You get it.  Based on the responses above from @Kindred ... they don't... and while I am likely just kicking a dead horse... I do need the exercise.

OK... I was here PLENTY of times yesterday.  Throughout the day.

No alerts.  At all.

This morning.  I pop in.  And low and behold... i have 8 alerts (indicated in the drop down section).  I click on the drop down and it shows 5 of them only.  I click ALL ALERTS and this is what I am presented with:

You cannot view this attachment.

As you can see... there are 5 UNREAD Alerts and 3 READ alerts there.

At the risk of invoking the ire of the SMF Team... i'll refrain from calling it "broken" ... but it certainly isn't "working correctly"... by any stretch.  Maybe one day the team will acknowledge the fact and I can stop posting examples of the system "working as intended".

EDIT: Oh,  and suddenly the alerts now show (5) in the drop down (the correct number if you ignore I never got the 3 alerts that I finally got this morning that were already read...) once I accessed that page... FWIW.

EDIT #2: Oh,  and to be crystal clear @Kindred ... this report is for THIS site... not my own server... not my own install... no "manual edits" of mine... etc...

shawnb61

The issue where the alert counter & popup got knocked out of sync with the alerts, as shown in FF's last post above, is confirmed as a bug.

PR submitted: https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF/pull/7510
Address the process rather than the outcome.  Then, the outcome becomes more likely.   - Fripp

FrizzleFried

Thank you Shawn...

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