notifications system

[burr86]

We have made a great deal of improvements to the notifications system, based on your feedback and based on our ongoing testing. There have been so many fixes that I may have forgotten to list some of them here; however, we have kept track of everything that's been reported, so if you don't see the issue listed in the "Known Issues" section, you can assume it's been fixed. (If it hasn't been fixed, please comment again!)

LAST UPDATED: 14 September 2006, 7:20pm CDT

Fixed Stuff

• Don't display the "tracking" checkmark on an entries if your subscription is inactive
• Fixed all the emails for standardized formatting (text of notification + a list of links to things you can do)
• Cleaned up the footer in the email so that it's not quite as big anymore
• Linked to the management pages for community join requests and invites, in the message center, so you can accept/reject the invite.
• Fixed display of subscriptions so they all fit the form "Notify me when ..."
• Changing all instances of "posts" to "entries" for standardization
• Referencing the userpic uploaded in the new-userpic notifications
• Adding support for managing notifications in the message center if you don't have JavaScript enabled
• Subscribing to any individual entry in a journal blocks you from getting regular comment notifications on entries you *didn't* track
• "Cancel" button on the Manage Message Settings appears when it shouldn't
• Comments/entries from suspended users display in the notification inbox when they shouldn't
• HTML comment notifications don't have linebreaks in comment body text.
• Can't selectively disable comment notifications for posts if you're subscribed to all comments to your journal
• Community join request emails still need to be cleaned up.
• Notifications magically mark themselves as read/unread.
• Subject line for comment notificatione emails don't include the subject line of the comment
• Sometimes you'll get duplicate notifications if you subscribed to an entry you'd otherwise get comments for.
• Pagination in the message center still isn't correct (fixed for real this time!)
• Notifications don't respect your HTML/plaintext preference
• Subject line for emails for new entries in a community don't include the poster's username
• Email notifications for comments don't include In-Reply-To, References, or X-Lj-Journal headers (so things don't thread right in Gmail)
• Paginate the notifications page with paging_bar from weblib.pl, to allow people to jump around
• Comment notification emails still tell you to go to the Comment Settings page to turn emails off.

Remaining Known Issues

• Replies to entries with polls won't generate comment notification emails.
• Incorrectly encoding the contents of comment notifications; sending one encoding header, but encoding the contents in another.
• Plaintext notifications for LJ announcements are full of HTML.
• Hitting refresh and re-POST'ing will resave the subscription you're adding
  
• Re-subscribing to an inactive subscription generates a new subscription instead of reactivating the old one
  
• Entries with polls/voiceposts/cuts (probably most lj-* tags) don't display the poll/voicepost in the message center
  
• CTRL+Click (in Firefox) from the message center won't open a new tab
• Randomly, some comment notifications won't actually include the text of the entry.
• "New entry" email notifications don't include the subject of the entry
• "New entry tagged X" notifications don't include the tag name.
• Include subject line of entries in notifications in the message center
• Mark items as read when they are individually expanded.

Other Suggested Improvements -- Not Guaranteed To Happen

• Error message when you've hit max subscriptions doesn't tell you what you can do to get more
• Add a (?) to /manage/subscriptions/ to link to the ESN FAQ
• The purpose of the "Select All" checkbox on the message settings page isn't clear
• Re-evaluate the use of /manage/subscriptions/ and /tools/notifications.bml based on wording elsewhere
• Include text of entries in those notifications
• Add ability to filter notifications
• Requesting an opt-out of this functionality
• Requesting the ability to see who's being notified of your posts or comments to an entry you posted

This system is still only open to permanent account holders (and, as of 05 Sept, paid users; 07 Sept, plus users) while we work out some of the remaining issues. If there's anything broken about the notifications system that isn't listed above, feel free to comment!

BEFORE YOU COMMENT: Make sure your issue isn't addressed in the list above! Commenting here with something that is already listed above won't get it fixed or changed faster.