New today for logged on users, you will notice that there is a new Notifications option at the top of the Forum micro-navigation at the top of the page.
Some of our old community members will notice a very large number next to the new notifications alert too
This has taken a good few weeks to put together - and I've added way more code to the site than I'm happy with to do it - but it seems to be the "done thing" now, and I can see the advantage of having it.
At the current time, the notifications system exposes notifications for:
Forums - @ mentions, thread author replies, direct replies and direct quotes.
HCL - @ mentions, new comment notices for the submitter and replies
SCL/DLC - @ mentions, new comment notices for the submitter and replies
Main News - @ mentions, new comment notices for the author and replies
I let the server populate the entire back-history of the forum database and it took the 16 cores on the server nearly 11.5 hours to crunch through the data set to find things like @mentions. consequently, some of you will have a very large back-history of notifications on your first view. Once you have looked at the notification drop down, the server will mark the listings all as read and from then on you can view your notification history on the new notification history page.
There are issues with the @ mention system in so far as up until last year when I implemented the code for @ tags on forum posts, the site allowed users to register with spaces in their username. The problem is that there is realistically no sane way to derive @ mentions from non-escaped text strings when they have spaces in the username. How much CPU time do you dedicate to looking up potential usernames over how many words and spaces? So if you have a space in your username, your receipt of @ mentions will be problematic until and unless your username is updated to drop the space or I rewrite the @ mention system to be some form of BBS markup tag such as for example [ @=username goes here]. *groan*
I anyone wants their username to be de-spaced in the interim, please PM me.
