Thread "Watch" Feature Intermittent

[deathlynx]

Recently I've noticed that I'm not always getting notifications for threads on the forum that I have either set to watch or even participated in. For reference, I mostly post in AH. I check my notifications a couple of times a day, and when I go through afterwards to see what new threads have popped up, I've spotted new posts in threads I'm supposed to be notified about. When I go back into notifications I confirm that they simply didn't appear, and a check of the thread shows I'm still, technically following it.

 

[Lumiere_Amie]

Recently I've noticed that I'm not always getting notifications for threads on the forum that I have either set to watch or even participated in. For reference, I mostly post in AH. I check my notifications a couple of times a day, and when I go through afterwards to see what new threads have popped up, I've spotted new posts in threads I'm supposed to be notified about. When I go back into notifications I confirm that they simply didn't appear, and a check of the thread shows I'm still, technically following it.

That's been a "feature" of the Watch feature for as long as I've been here. I know others also experience it. I've always just assumed it's a bug in the Forum software.

 

[AG31]

Recently I've noticed that I'm not always getting notifications for threads on the forum that I have either set to watch or even participated in. For reference, I mostly post in AH. I check my notifications a couple of times a day, and when I go through afterwards to see what new threads have popped up, I've spotted new posts in threads I'm supposed to be notified about. When I go back into notifications I confirm that they simply didn't appear, and a check of the thread shows I'm still, technically following it.

In my case it's been me overlooking an alert, maybe because it drifted to the next page. But in your case, watching only one forum, I wonder if you're taking note of "there may be more posts after this?"

 

[AG31]

Recently I've noticed that I'm not always getting notifications for threads on the forum that I have either set to watch or even participated in. For reference, I mostly post in AH. I check my notifications a couple of times a day, and when I go through afterwards to see what new threads have popped up, I've spotted new posts in threads I'm supposed to be notified about. When I go back into notifications I confirm that they simply didn't appear, and a check of the thread shows I'm still, technically following it.

If you don't want to open a particular thread, are you careful to click the read/not read circle in the lower right to "read?"

 

[KittyOfSteele]

It's a XenForo thing, not a Lit thing. The engine only sends you notifications when you're actively participating in the thread, meaning you're posting in it.

Already experienced that in other XenForo sites.

 

[AG31]

It's a XenForo thing, not a Lit thing. The engine only sends you notifications when you're actively participating in the thread, meaning you're posting in it.

Already experienced that in other XenForo sites.

Or, if you click "watch" for the thread or the forum. Are we in a laptop vs phone thing here? I've never heard of XenForo.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Or, if you click "watch" for the thread or the forum. Are we in a laptop vs phone thing here? I've never heard of XenForo.

XenForo is the engine that powers Lit forums.

The device has nothing to do with it. It's just the way XenForo is, same way as you can have two motorcycles with the same engine, but on the outside are completely different to each other.

My speculation is that XenForo does this to keep your notifications clean, by prioritizing the threads you interact with the most, and feed you notifications from those, while stopping sending you notifications from the rest. The solution I've found is usually to post something in the threads you stopped being notified of, and then you get notifications again.

 

[qidniz]

I've never heard of XenForo.

Xenforo is a professional product. The forums are not the result of a home grown system like the rest of this site.

 

[Britva415]

This is a little bit of a "by-design" behavior. It might not be a good design, but it's not a bug.

The designers of this commercial software package (not the designers of Literotica) decided that the forum would notify you once if a watched topic had new posts. Then it keeps track to see whether you responded to the notification or not, and, if you don't, then, it assumes you'll get to it when you want to, and it won't ping you again for additional new posts.

The "intermittent" drop-out you're seeing almost certainly means you just didn't react to a notification and go read the thread.

So there are a couple of ways to work around this:

One is to go to your "Show All" list. It doesn't go back forever, but, it may let you see more old notifications than you can see on the pull-down list by the bell icon. If you find a notification there which may be days old, now you can click through it and catch up on the thread. This will reset the notification system so it will ping you again next time.

Another is to use the "Mark (all as) Read" option when you're looking at the notifications list. It isn't totally clear to me whether this marks your entire notification history as "read," or only the ones that are visible in the list. I suspect it's the latter, because sometimes I still have to go to the third and fourth workarounds:

Unfortunately the forum software doesn't seem to provide a list of all your Watched Threads. But if you know which threads you're watching, navigate to them and catch up on them. That will reset the notifications.

If you don't know the list of threads you're watching, you can mark an entire forum or subforum as Read. So you can either just navigate to all the forum and subforum top pages and use the "Mark Read" button (right next to the Watch button) or only do it for the forums or subforums where you know you have watched threads.

 

[AG31]

My speculation is that XenForo does this to keep your notifications clean, by prioritizing the threads you interact with the most, and feed you notifications from those, while stopping sending you notifications from the rest.

My notifications seem to be strictly under my control. I don't get notified unless I set a watch on a forum or thread or reply to or create a thread. I don't get further notifications if I don't open or mark as read an alerted post for a specific thread.

 

[AG31]

The "intermittent" drop-out you're seeing almost certainly means you just didn't react to a notification and go read the thread.

I agree.

 

[deathlynx]

What you're describing doesn't sound like what I'm experiencing. For example, I'm a frequent poster in the Terrible Plot Bunnies thread, so it's definitely one that should appear in my notifications. This morning, when I was checking through things, there were new posts in it, but I received no notification, either when I use the drop-down list in the upper right, or when I click on the bell to view the full "past notifications" pages. I've gone back and checked for it afterwards.

I can see where the thread falls in the forum itself, so I know that a notification for it should be somewhere between specific other threads. ones that do appear on my watch notifications. While it might slip between notifications of people's reactions to my posts (given those are impossible to track time-wise) the time of a post in a thread is clear and easy to compare with posts in other threads.

I refer to it as intermittent because it isn't happening with the same threads. In fact, it doesn't seem to happen with the same thread twice. Today it was Terrible Plot Bunnies, but yesterday was the Official Summer Lovin' thread. I'm not sure about specific threads over the past few days, just that it's been different. And that they do seem to pop back into my notifications a day or so later. The only reason I remember TPB is because of how often I post there. It was the most notable one, as I do post there, and fairly easy to spot in my notifications history.

 

[Lumiere_Amie]

So, I went to my list of Watched threads and reacted to at least one post in each. While I was doing so, I could see my notifications piling up. Now all those threads that had stopped notifying me have returned. This is evidence of what @Britva415 said about engagement. Thank you!