Poll for new replies should decay far more slowly

[Colonel_mortis]

Currently, when you view a topic, it polls for new replies every 60s, and every time nothing is found it increases by 20s. However, for instant notifications, it starts polling every 20s, Then after 15 minutes it increases to every 40s, and after 45 minutes it goes up to every 60s. This means that most of the time that you get an instant notification, the only reasonable way to load the new comment is to refresh the page, because the chances are that you will be waiting multiple minutes before being able to display it. It doesn't help that it is not at all obvious to users that the two different systems are completely independent, leading them to think that they are broken in some way ("it's not giving me the option to show the post" or "I'm getting two notifications for each new reply").

Ideally, the two systems would be much better if they were combined, but that would require quite a lot of work, and wouldn't be appropriate for a minor release (though it would be great to see in 4.2), but for now it would help a lot of the poll for new replies interval was greater, and it decayed less quickly, so users can reliably expect to be able to load the new comment without having to refresh. It doesn't help that the notification links are of the form ?page=5#comment-1234 rather than ?do=findComment&comment=1234 (or whatever the parameters are), so clicking the notification while already viewing that thread will do nothing, because it's just a hash change (to an invalid anchor) rather than a link that will force the page to reload.