[07-MAR-2016] Current status of BLF upgrade process

I see the email system is working again, congrats! I’m sure that was a lot of work.

I’ve gotten used to not having them though…. and I kind of like the “peace and quiet”. I think I’m about to go on an “Unsubscribe spree”. :cowboy_hat_face:

Subscriptions email shocker this morning, what a wonderful surprise, thank you for all your hard and must be frustrating work…!

My pleasure, glad it’s working. And sorry if anybody got hit with a deluge of mails until I got the system working correctly.

LOL Me too. I forgot how quickly my inbox fills up. Now if only we could set it up to only send email notifications for threads we start or select to be notified for. I’m picturing SB doing a face-palm right about now. Is there a cake in the area that I may posses and also ingest? O:-)

Ha! :slight_smile: I’m not opposed to the idea, but I probably won’t get it to very soon.

Ha Ha Ha that’s the word I was trying to think of, Deluged… But really a smiling moment and great way to start the day,
Kronos thread alone I recall at last glance was something like 200+ since last going to the thread which was lesson learned, if you follow go follow more often so that count doesn’t get so high,
You really don’t realize just how many threads you’ve been watching or not consistently until you turn on your email one day and suddenly there’s seemingly hundreds of notices.
I’m with PD68 and others and going to be on a unsubscribe mission,
Thank you SB, This upgrade must be just maddening, But I’m sure glad theirs people like you making life for people like me FUN …!!

That pretty much sums it up. :slight_smile: But everybody here has been very gracious and patient and appreciative, which makes it a lot easier and much more motivating to get things working.

Update: 02-MAR-2016
I’m now testing another improvement to the email notification system so that it will only send notification emails to users that haven’t been active during the past 10 minutes. (I can easily adjust the time if needed. Note that “active” is defined as clicking links or posting, not just having a browser tab open.) I hope this will drastically reduce the amount of notification emails for heavy users during the hours that they are active.

And also remember that the system only sends one email per user thread until the user returns (logged in) to re-visit the thread.

Thanks for your work sb, but for me this is not an improvement.

I would prefer to receive an email right when there is a new post in one of my subscribed threads.

OK, I can probably make this an option. I’m going to leave it on by default until I have a bit more time to work on it.

I’m getting e-mail notifications again! Hoo-yah! Gracias.

It do not sound very practical, that way I will always miss an answer if people post just after I have left the computer.

OMG, email notification works again, best news from blf in a long time, i’ve been like blind without this function :cowboy_hat_face:

+1
I usually have 2-3 BLF tabs open in my browser keeping them for later reading or as a reminder, it does look like I am online but I am actually doing something else not related to BLF, and my browser is running all the time (except when I sleep) which means I will miss like 60-70% of replies, hmmm 8-|

Edit:
Wait, what does the “active” means? active like logged in / online or like scrolling pages, posting comments which means there are log files with informations on which pages I visited, which comments I read, what button and when I clicked… that is kinda disturbing.

I find it annoying, i turned it off right away
My subscriptions is far superior

Tracking your “active” status doesn’t require logging your actual activity. The site has already been keeping track of “active” status since before the upgrade. It shows up on all your posts, under your avatar, as “Last Seen…”

I find it more than useful, I lost track on 90% of interesting topics while notification wasn’t working, it should been no1 on a “to fix” list. If there are no updates in some particular topic/thread for several hours it “falls” down to page 2-3, a day or two without update and that thread will be lost on god know which page and if OP decides to change title (which happens quite frequently) it might be lost forever if there were no email notifications.

Yes but, information is available, it’s like a hole in a wall to a neighbour apartment, only curiosity is what stands between your eye and that hole…

P.S. is there a way to turn off this “no notification for last 10 active minutes” “featre”?

BLF mostly uses “Web 1.0” tech, meaning you send a request for a page, the server sends back the requested page, and then no further interaction happens until you request another page. If you don’t click anything, no data is transferred either way. “Active” time just means the last time a page was requested by your logged-in account.

Unlike, say, facebook, which has javascript running all the time to chat back and forth between server and client whenever a page is open.

So, the BLF server has no idea whether you have a bunch of tabs open. All it knows is which pages you requested and when. I would assume this is logged in a standard apache access log, with a log rotation system deleting anything older than a given length of time. It probably has a list of requests from the past week, but not from, say, six months ago. And it likely does not track on a per-user basis, but rather a per-IP-address basis. That’s default on most web servers. IP addresses do not correlate 1-to-1 with users, so it would take some non-trivial effort to figure out who did what based only on the data in the logs.

Note, “Web 1.0” is often a good thing. I prefer that all sites be built this way unless they have specific and significant reasons to do otherwise. Like, use “Web 2.0” for full-fledged interactive applications like Google Maps and Google Docs, but use “Web 1.0” for forums and blogs since they work fine with older technology.

Right, the site has no idea whether you have it loaded in a browser window or tab.

I can disable the 10 minute waiting period if most prefer it that way, but I’m surprised that I’m the only one who wants this feature. I find it very annoying after a day of browsing and posting to receive a plethora of email notifications for updated threads that I’ve already viewed because I saw them under “My Subscriptions” or in the “Recent Posts” list.

I actually don’t have the Nginx access log enabled, just the error log. And in any case Drupal can’t even see those logs, and instead keeps its own access log (normally as a table in the database, but can optionally use the syslog) which is retained for 2 days.

I can assure you that putting it as #1 on the todo list would have much easier said than done. O:-) It took me a good solid 20 hours almost non-stop to re-implement the notifications system, as it is custom designed and coded by yours truly. And let’s just say that it’s a good thing I don’t write code for a living, because I’m AWFUL at it! :stuck_out_tongue: The most irritating part is that it was working flawlessly with the old site engine, but with this upgrade they went and broke most of the APIs and data structures I had come to know and hate from the old version.

In my personal case it’s actually much easier to lose track of something in my email inbox. Regardless of the status of the email notifications system, you might try using the My Subscriptions page a bit more to keep track of posts you don’t want to lose track of.

I’d be glad to if the majority prefers it that way. First I’m going to try to add it as an option, except that I’m running into a bug with the site engine that is preventing me from doing it in the easy and straightforward way I had planned.