Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

I'm sure you've checked, but often people have enabled email notifications but not the global switch.

Yes, I did check that, but it was as normal, and PMs are the only thing that I notifications for. Stopped working halfway through yesterday for some reason.

I've logged out and back in, and the email code came through ok.

I'm not getting the email when I receive a PM, maybe I'm alone in this problem as nobody else has posted. I've checked the settings, and my junk folder, all good.

I've checked your settings and you are good.

• Edit Profile > Notification Settings > Enable Notifications = true
  
• Edit Profile > Notification Settings > Notify on Private Message = true
  
  

I've checked the email provider, and every email sent to you has been delivered.

I've checked the status of all PMs you are a part of, and you are watching them all with email notification enabled.

I've checked the status of the watchers, and notifications have been triggered.

The last one to trigger I can trace through from the server sending it, the email provider delivering it, and you opening it.

Perhaps this is just my anti-spam code?

My anti-spam code does this:

• Send an email notifying you
  
• If you haven't re-visited the site and acted on it... suppress further emails
  
  

i.e.

• You send a PM
  
• Someone replies and an email gets sent
  
• Someone replies and no email is sent
  
• Someone replies and no email is sent
  
• Someone replies and no email is sent
  
• You visit the site and read the PM
  
• Someone replies and an email gets sent
  
• Someone replies and no email is sent
  
  

That is... by reading a PM, conversation or event on the site... you reset the notifications and it will send more emails.

This exists to prevent people spamming a PM, conversation or event, which would lead to us spamming you.

So perhaps it's that?

It could well be that... I give the full info of a PM in a notification, and perhaps that means you're not coming to the site to mark them as read to reset the notifications?

Thanks. It might have been your anti-spam thing kicking in, but it was a case of me visiting the site, and oh, I've got a PM, reply to PM, then visit again later, oh, another PM (but no email), which happened a few times Friday evening.

Anyway, it's fine now, so thanks for replying, and nothing to worry about.

Am I alone in not being able to quote posts when using my iPhone?

Am I alone in not being able to quote posts when using my iPhone?

Apparently perhaps maybe? I had to copy and paste..

It requires manual intervention, copy and paste.

The choice we had when we made it, and that we still have:

• We give plain text boxes and phone keyboards love it, but you lose some functionality that is built in on desktops (quoting by highlighting text)
  
• We give richer text boxes and phones all hate it, but we can retain all of the functionality
  
  

We chose the former.

We just wanted the text boxes to work, even when on a weak signal, and without you having to wait for it. We also wanted it to take advantage of your phone keyboard as much as possible, which meant just saying to your phone "I'm a text box, gimme text".

It works, lack of quoting is a minor thing.

Makes sense and at least I know its not something I'm doing wrong.

Cheers.

lack of quoting is a minor thing.

It's an Apple thing. The quote above was done on WP10 in pretty much the same way as I do it on the desk top machine, highlight text to quote and hit reply.

It's an Apple thing

Test on Chrome on Android...

Seems to work

Is there anything I can do to speed up the 'Following' page? It loads much slower than all the others on both laptop and phone. I'm using Safari on both, generally.

Don't really mind if there isn't, but wouldn't want to be the sucker waiting while everyone else enjoys superfast updates to the day's important news.

Is there anything I can do to speed up the 'Following' page?

Occasionally mark everything read (link is bottom right on the home page).

The following page is a beast to calculate and does take a moment to perform the query, almost 1 second or so.

However if you mark everything read, it can do the same query in half the time.

The key is understanding how we store and calculate this stuff... if you mark everything read we store a single value, then over time we store a value for every thing that you visit and also track the time of all things that you are following that have had updates. We end up havin to crunch tens of thousands of pieces of information, just to be able to show the word "New" next to things.

If you mark everything as read occasionally you greatly reduce the number of things we're crunching when we make that page.

Marking everything as read only marks forums and their content as read... not private messages. So if you've caught up on reading... mark everything read.

Cheers, that makes sense and I can already see that's helped. Would there be further benefit by not following ancient threads I no longer care about?

You would have to unfollow a hell of a lot of old things for that to make sense.

After marking things as "New" the next biggest slowdown is on permissions and ignored stuff.

If you happen to ignore a shedload of stuff, then that could slow things as we have to get all the things only to then exclude a lot of things. Ignoring people is more costly on the query than ignoring posts.

Then there are items in forums, and really it's not the age that matters here... it's the number of distinct forums the things are in and the sheer quantity of them.

How many pages of stuff on your following page do you have?

For reference, I have 266 pages. Which is a fair load of stuff, and yet I see in Google Chrome's network debugger that it only takes 0.9s to generate a following page (I recently marked everything read, I am not ignoring anything at the moment).

I would indeed, it's at 325 pages. Don't ignore anybody and can't remember ignoring any forums, though may have done in the past.

I tried Chrome's debugger and Today (by comparison) is taking ~350-400ms every time. Following is taking 5.5-7.5s each time. Actually, when I marked everything as read, the next time clocked in at 12.66s, but that was a one-off.

Woah, those times are crazy.

Confirmed, I'm seeing 6.12s when running the query as if I were you.

I'll take a look and will see if something is amiss.

Anyone else find threads they've subscribed to stop emailing them about updates?

This has been happening forever but I finally thought I'd mention it.

It seems once you visit a subscribed thread again the emails start arriving again.

This has always been the case, and was the case with vBulletin before it.

It's a simple anti-spam thing.

Only the first new comment in a conversation you're subscribed to will trigger an email. Once you visit the conversation that gets reset... and the next comment will be the only one that sends an email.

If 10 comments were made between visits, only 1 email (for the first comment since you visited) will be sent.

But I normally check the thread on every email received. I realise it's not sending updates when there's more posts, I'm talking about updates just stopping even though I'd have read the email notification and clicked through to the thread in question.
Perhaps I missed one but it does seem to happen a lot.

It does seem more noticeable on Microcosm than elsewhere, but whenever it's been questioned I've been able to follow through the notifications log, prove emails dispatched and opened (yup, that bit of the system logs stuff).

I've wondered whether it's because I put the full message into an email notification. On mobile devices this means it feels like you've caught up and read everything when actually you've only read the notification.

So it is a chore... to get the next notification, click the link to the item. On mobile that is a pretty shitty experience, and where I think the problem is.

It's definitely possible I've been out, on the phone, probably pissed and clicked through to stuff then not finished the thread, but I was aware of that and not often reading forum stuff on my phone. Maybe I could stop using the mobile for the forum altogether (I'd need to block it, really) then it would eliminate that possibility.

Whenever I try to open the last page of this thread, my browser (IE11) crashes. Wagwan?

I've been militant opening every email and not using the mobile for the forum and I've not noticed the problem so it was probably me maybe walking around, opening an email on the phone, then having to put the phone down quickly without reading the thread.

Search doesn't seem to work for me on Android chrome.