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Watched Items / VNC List Serious Bug


Real Hal9000

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Hello people,

Initially, I've posted this message in an old ticket issue but since I got no reply, I decided to post it here. I think this particular problem isn't known at all and may bring too much trouble for any admin of a big board who depends on the sound function of Watched Topics list and View New Content page.

http://community.invisionpower.com/tracker/issue-21303-watched-topics-hook/page__gopid__101661

I am trying very hard to understand why you treat this bug in such a low priority.

First, I would like to correct Jason's initial bug report. It is a bug that does not affect just the users that are subscribed with no email notification. It's a bug that affects everyone who has subscriptions other than "immediate notifications". We may say that "delayed notification" kind of works, but we have to admit that Daily Digest, Weekly Digest and No Notification do not work at all. So, we have 1 out of 5 working smoothly (immediate) and 1 out of 5 'kind of working' (delayed).

Let's now think the importance of this feature. People want to know what are the latest replies on their watched content, ordered by last reply descending. It's that simple. It's how hard-core forum users trace and browse the forum. It's how the people who are the heart of the forum work.

Actually, these people have two ways of working: The watched content, which as I said works well 1 out of 5. And the View New Content, which again in sphinx mode is not working, as it has a serious sorting error http://community.inv...-sort-ordering/ Regarding the latter, you need to understand that it may not be a bug on your implementation but it is a bug for the end user. The end user does not care for details, the end user just wants the content of that page to be delivered as expected. In our case, we have many new posts each minute and the users had to browse in more than 20 pages to get posts made in the last minutes! In other words, sphinx mode of VNC: not working.

So, just imagine the frustration of the users when we launched the new version, switching from a competitor's board to IPB. They simply could not follow the forum anymore. The momentum of the move and the new (and great) features we introduced was simply lost because of Watched Topics (and VNC of course). Some days after the roll-out we had to manually change the ordering to last_post and switch to sql search for VNC, but the momentum was already gone.

In other words, just do it, it's absolutely necessary. It is not "a lot of overhead for potentially little gain". On the contrary, my recent experience of users' reactions showed me that it's "some overhead for one of the most necessary features in big forums". And please consider not to have it 'almost hidden' as it is now. This is a feature that deserves a full page of its own, like that of "My Content".

Regards,
Kostas

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  • 1 month later...

Hi,

I do not know if your bug is the same as ours, but also, when we fire up Sphinx search engine, VNC just crash with an error like "Fatal error: Allowed memory size xxx of bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /xxx/xxx/class_forums.php on line 916

If we use the "traditionnal" search engine, everything is working fine.
Otherwise, sphinx is running perfectly.

We previously had IPB v 3.0.x with no problem at all. We have just migrated on version 3.1.4.

Thanx for any help,

Akta

forums.audipassion.com

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Hello people,



Initially, I've posted this message in an old ticket issue but since I got no reply, I decided to post it here. I think this particular problem isn't known at all and may bring too much trouble for any admin of a big board who depends on the sound function of Watched Topics list and View New Content page.



http://community.invisionpower.com/tracker/issue-21303-watched-topics-hook/page__gopid__101661



I am trying very hard to understand why you treat this bug in such a low priority.



First, I would like to correct Jason's initial bug report. It is a bug that does not affect just the users that are subscribed with no email notification. It's a bug that affects everyone who has subscriptions other than "immediate notifications". We may say that "delayed notification" kind of works, but we have to admit that Daily Digest, Weekly Digest and No Notification do not work at all. So, we have 1 out of 5 working smoothly (immediate) and 1 out of 5 'kind of working' (delayed).



Let's now think the importance of this feature. People want to know what are the latest replies on their watched content, ordered by last reply descending. It's that simple. It's how hard-core forum users trace and browse the forum. It's how the people who are the heart of the forum work.



Actually, these people have two ways of working: The watched content, which as I said works well 1 out of 5. And the View New Content, which again in sphinx mode is not working, as it has a serious sorting error http://community.inv...-sort-ordering/ Regarding the latter, you need to understand that it may not be a bug on your implementation but it is a bug for the end user. The end user does not care for details, the end user just wants the content of that page to be delivered as expected. In our case, we have many new posts each minute and the users had to browse in more than 20 pages to get posts made in the last minutes! In other words, sphinx mode of VNC: not working.



So, just imagine the frustration of the users when we launched the new version, switching from a competitor's board to IPB. They simply could not follow the forum anymore. The momentum of the move and the new (and great) features we introduced was simply lost because of Watched Topics (and VNC of course). Some days after the roll-out we had to manually change the ordering to last_post and switch to sql search for VNC, but the momentum was already gone.



In other words, just do it, it's absolutely necessary. It is not "a lot of overhead for potentially little gain". On the contrary, my recent experience of users' reactions showed me that it's "some overhead for one of the most necessary features in big forums". And please consider not to have it 'almost hidden' as it is now. This is a feature that deserves a full page of its own, like that of "My Content".



Regards,


Kostas



That's exactly what I've been saying since I've moved here. My most recent complaint is [url=" my watched thread complaint/suggestion is similar to yours. They've known about this "bug" for some time now and continue to ignore it. I don't want to be notified of new posts. I just want to go to a page to see if the thread I'm watching has been updated. At the same time, I don't want to go to a page and see ALL of my watched threads and have to scroll through each section just to see where the new posts are and not scrolling through watched threads that don't have new posts (unless I click a link saying I want to see all).

I feel the whole system needs a re-coding and makeover. I'm not a coder so I may be over stepping my bounds but this is something that has HURT my site.

Just so people know how badly it has hurt my activity:
With vB
Time on site: 18-19 minutes
Pages/visit: 17-18
Pageviews per month: over 20 million

On IPB:
Time on site: 7 minutes
Pages/visit: 7
Pageviews per month: 12 million

Not sure the exact reason for this yet as it could be a combination of things. Other than aesthetics, the only feature that has REALLY changed on my site is the subscribed threads/watched threads. I've tried various things to get activity going again but people are just having a tougher time interacting on the site. They are now relying on the notification system for posts that they are quoted in. That's how they are keeping track of the threads.

Now, I could be wrong, but they may have fixed in 3.1.4. My site went down and has been down due to server failures since I upgraded so I don't know but I think I may have read that in one of my complaint threads? Either way...it still needs improvement to the way it works and the way it looks.
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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Adding my two pence too.

Large(ish) site over at briskdoda.net.
Currently on a backup VM while our main server is fixed. As a result I took the opportunity to update and implement sphinx properly.

As you can imagine the community is less than happy at the moment.

I'll be raising a ticket too.

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