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Who wrote this shonky forum software. Eh?

The Following tab can duplicate things if you're being notified by several criteria at once.

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/131364/ >>>>>

Feel free to help improve this query:
https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microcosm/blob/master/models/updates.go#L329-L487

I can't program, but I can think, I solved this issue in excel by ordering a list alphabetically, check if row n = row n-1, delete if it does. Reorder by date/time, publish.

That manual process applied to a spreadsheet on your laptop is one thing. Managing data at scale in an automated fashion in an online application with a large number of concurrent users is a whole different context.

But hey, how hard can it be? It works on your laptop.

There are shortcuts to this in database query languages - I thought it was more a design decision over whether it's beneficial to have the same thread shown twice in the stream because the context differs in each instance.

i.e. if I @Backstop you then it's likely this thread shows up twice for you because I've both replied and included your handle in the post.

Or something.

Why are you so spicy these days?

I can't program, but I can think,

Got just as much spice as it merited. mashton was joking, but that's just "How hard can it be?" with extra peeve.

Well quite, I suspect it might not be optimal but that's rarely the bar for posting on here!

Also, it was not meant to be taken very seriously.

Consider me triggered. It's my area of work, where both "it works on my laptop" and "It's simple in Excel so it must be easy in your database" are particularly prickly red rags.

I mean... it might be as simple as removing the update_id and update_type_id from the UNION so that the GROUP BY merges the duplicates.

Hmm... no, wouldn't work... because then I could never determine how to render the items as "someone mentioned you" etc... nor which email notifications to send.

Maybe I could do all of the queries individually in advance and implement UNION in code once I've read them, or even in a SQL query which chooses rows WHERE NOT EXISTS.

Hmm... no, wouldn't work. On the first page this would be fine, but once you start paginating updates each query would track a different offset depending on the number of items for that type of update.

Hmm.

I can't think of any obvious way to avoid it within the query.

But maybe it can just be done in code when rendered... it would lead to uneven pages where if duplicates were discovered one was removed. So sometimes on these edge cases there would be 23 updates on a page rather than 25 updates... but this is probably OK, you might never even notice the unequal page lengths. It wouldn't solve duplicates that spanned pages, but again you probably wouldn't notice.

So it seems like this could be done at render time... keep updates only if the item hasn't already been shown.

Which leads to another question... what to keep? Probably the most specific... i.e. keep mentions above "someone commented", keep "you posted" above "new thread in forum".

To do that probably needs a double-parsing within the API that returns the updates. This is doable, at that point the slice is only 25 items and all in memory so it wouldn't hurt, and this is only on the updates page as the search page doesn't have this problem.

So that's an idea of how this could be done... remove duplicates within the API post-query but pre-render.

Edit: never mind, comment is unnecessary after having refreshed the page

Yea, I don't envy IT in a commercial/employee type situation.

I didn't want to suggest that "thinking" was a greater intellectual activity than programming.

But maybe it can just be done in code when rendered..

That's what I said.

Would hear you like to race conditions about a joke?

Excellent marketing technique btw Fizzy.

#triggered...

IT and programming aren't necessarily the same thing.

While at university studying computer science I bought a t-shirt which said "No I will not fix your computer". Has been relevant on multiple occasions since.

fuck all good it's done :(

Wow my hero

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

While at university studying computer science I bought a t-shirt which said "No I will not fix your computer". Has been relevant on multiple occasions since.

I used to go round to their room, look at it for a minute or so and then ask them to pass me a big hammer.

Was this before or after you asked to borrow their D20?

Can I get this thread moved to the new non bike CP subforum please.. This way I can have the first thread in a subforum. Wootwoot.

Could move this one too, I’ll then do some updates! https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/283213/?offset=75#comment14620733

Moved those two threads