Broken alerts? Lookie here!

Do you encounter this a lot?

  • No, and I wasn't aware of it!

    Votes: 25 20.2%
  • No, but I know people who do!

    Votes: 20 16.1%
  • Only sometimes!

    Votes: 49 39.5%
  • Yes, but this didn't work for me!

    Votes: 10 8.1%
  • Yes, and this fixed my problem!

    Votes: 17 13.7%
  • Exclamation Points!

    Votes: 14 11.3%
  • Periods.

    Votes: 8 6.5%

  • Total voters
    124
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S

SamIO

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So, @jared555 explained this to me, and I thought it'd be helpful if everybody knew about this. :3

Xenforo is a rather common forum codebase, so this probably applies to about ninety-nine percent of the Internet for those of us who roleplay all over the place.

Let me start with this: It's not a bug, nothing's really broken, and there's an easy fix if you can catch it when it happens. Essentially there's this feature that gags alerts to prevent you from getting spammed by every post on every watched thread ever.

When you receive an alert from a watched thread, the system prevents any future alerts from that thread until it is flagged as read — which happens when you read the last post, not always the post you got the alert for, and never the alert itself. That's why the alert points out that "There may be more posts after this." The quick solution is to read the last post of the thread, and your alerts for that thread will be all fixed! :D

The reason why some people have this problem and others don't is because our behavior affects whether we encounter this problem or not. If you're somebody who reads every single post the second you're notified of it, or if you're someone who regularly checks threads manually, you probably haven't had this problem; conversely, if you're a person that checks the alert but doesn't always read the post in question, or if you don't keep up-to-date on threads all the time, you might have run into this on more than one occasion.

tl;dr: If you suspect a thread's notifications are broken, read the last post! If this happens to you a lot, avoid looking at your alerts until you're ready to read the whole post and every post thereafter. The system is just trying to keep itself from spamming you! o3o
 
That you for posting this explanation for people. O__O This IS the #1 reason people are not getting all the alerts they are expecting.
 
Good work on this. This will solve mine and Fluffy's problem we thought we had with alerts.
 
So that's why I've never had any problems with the notifications xD
 
Is there a way of forcing it to spam me for every post made? I'd rather get flooded with notifications than assume a thread has died simply because I don't get notifications for it.
 
Is there a way of forcing it to spam me for every post made? I'd rather get flooded with notifications than assume a thread has died simply because I don't get notifications for it.

Afraid not. :( It's not only to prevent you from being spammed, but also a way to reduce the load on the server so it's not sending millions of alerts and emails to thousands of users.
 
Nope, as explained in the post, you'll have to read them before you can get a new alert for that thread. At the moment there's no set up to change how the alerts show, you can only pick which threads/forums you want alerts from. Since it's a thing that has to do with Xenforo and not iwaku, there's not much the admins can do about it.
 
That actually makes a lot of sense! Now I know why, for the most part I get all my alerts, but every now and then, I won't notice that there's a new post, particularly when I haven't had a reason to post in the thread in a cool minute. Thanks for clearing that up! XD
 
Hmm, I do have one question about alerts, Sometimes it says there is X number of alerts, but there is only X-1 (or sometimes more) number of alerts.
 
That you for posting this explanation for people. O__O This IS the #1 reason people are not getting all the alerts they are expecting.
Might wanna sticky this for that very reason, I think I've made at least 3 posts explaining this to people I RP with ;p
 
One thing that may help also is once you are done reading new posts, hit the 'Mark forums read' link on the menu bar. Remember though it will remove the bold effect even on threads you haven't read at all until the next reply.
 
I thought it was the issue. Glad to see I'm not insane xD Although it's still somewhat a problem when you check there's an alert but lack the time to check the thread until later, and it never alerts you again; maybe if you can edit it so alerts don't go away until selected (like with messages) or something? But I think just awareness of the issue will fix it
 
This is a silly system.

I'm sure I'll manage, though~
 
If you enable email notifications you could base it off of read/unread in your email. *hears the email server cry out in pain*
 
Why are all the voting options exclamations? I do not wish to exclaim. I wish to vote in a level, non-ejaculatory voice.

:|
 
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Why are all the voting options exclamations? I do not wish to exclaim. I wish to vote in a level, non-ejaculatory voice.

:|
Because when I wrote all the options with periods, it sounded dull and pedantic. ^.^;
 
Welcome to democracy. You'll use periods and like it. >:[
 
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