levik
2005-01-25 19:50:45 |
New Watch List feature
Some of you may have noticed the new Watch List feature implemented today at David Shin's suggestion. Let me explain how it works...
You need to be logged in to the site to see anything new, and if you are, you will see an "Add to Watch List" link under every problem in it's detail page. You will also see a "My Watch List" link in the top of the side menu.
Your watch list will list all your new problems, including any new comments posted since you last viewed the problem's detail page. This means however that if you add a problem to the watch list and then post a comment, this comment will NOT be shown as "new", since you just saw it. Because it would tax the database too much, there is no indication of any new comments on any of the other pages (so, unfortunately, the "My Watch List" link will never have a comment number next to is as David suggested). |
David Shin
2005-01-25 20:05:34 |
Re: New Watch List feature
Hmmm...I'm not exactly sure how the back-end works, but...what if you had a map of problem ID's to lists of user ID's of users who have put that problem on their watch list? Then you'd also have a map of user ID's to the number of new watched-problem-comments for that user. When a comment gets added to a problem, you could look up the list of users who are watching that comment, and update their number appropriately. There are a lot of tricky details, but it certainly seems feasible. |
levik
2005-01-25 20:15:00 |
Re: New Watch List feature
The problem with such an approach is that in the extreme situation where a problem is watched by a lot of users (potentially thousands), every time a comment is posted, thousands of rows will need to have this counter incremented in the database slowing down the entire site (and others sites on the server).
Instead, I keep the timestamp when you last looked at your watch list problem, and for each problem list the number of comments posted after this date. |
nikki
2005-01-25 21:46:17 |
Re: New Watch List feature
I like it so far. What I've had to do before this is click on New Comments, and look around and see if any of the new comments were about problems I was interested in. If I went on a long Perplexus hiatus, and someone commented during that time, I wouldn't realize it until the NEXT time someone commented.
I even experience having one of the items "turn yellow" and say that it had one new comment. Pretty exciting =)
Very nice, I approve, not that you needed my approval =D |
Michael Cottle
2005-01-26 02:35:37 |
Re: New Watch List feature
Cool!
An excellent way to keep track of favorites and new postings of those favorites without the thumbing through web pages and pages of other irrelevant puzzles.
I like it! :) |
