happy january 24th! it’s not a holiday or anything, but we’re in the mood to be needlessly specific.
lots of performance fixes these past couple weeks while we continue work on tipping and some other new features in the background.
- we made notifications more reliable by fixing a design flaw in the way we count new notifications.
- under the hood, we used to keep count by keeping a cache of all the notifications you’d gotten recently and counting how many of them you hadn’t seen yet. if we weren’t tracking a cache for you, we would ignore new notifications, which would prevent the “unread” count from being updated.
- however, the cache can get discarded if the site needs to keep track of something else and doesn’t have the extra cache space, and the only way to get a notification cache when you didn’t have one already was to click on the notification page in the menu.
- this poses an in-retrospect-obvious UI problem: if your notification cache gets disposed in favor of something else, how are you ever going to know to check your notifications again?
- now we keep a separate count — which is tiny by comparison — and refer to that if you don’t have a cache.
- we don’t want to break notifications worse on the way to fixing them, so we’re doing a gradual rollout on this change to field bug reports as we go, but we expect the rollout to be pretty quick.
