Reply Notifications

As well, I would also like to suggest the use of a dedicated reply section for the site; that is, users receiving notifications when other people reply to comments that they have made, as would occur in the case of pms.

Aaahh so that’s what that Watch button is for…

Protip: Hit Watch on http://derpiboo.ru/meta/forum-updates

You know what be a cool thing? If you watched pictures you commented on immediately rather than having to selected.

Also, I noticed that I get a notification about my own posts. Is that a bug or something?

You shouldn’t get notified about your posts since you get directed to the page immediately and it thus gets marked read but this won’t happen for comments. We can filter out notifications to yourself pretty easily though.
 
Automatic watching I’ll add; don’t think it’ll cause any issues but I might throw a setting in for it in user preferences (defaulted to on).

@Clover the Clever  
Well, that’s exactly what happens:
 
I make a comment, watch the picture, then change to another picture, a new notification appears, and lo and behold it is my own comment. Just thought to let you know. In case I’m the only one, I’m going to try to give you more clear info on how to replicate it.

@Background Pony  
I just did with this forum thing and it did the same thing: make comment, click to go elsewhere, new notification.

This should be fixed now. If it’s not fixed, do shout.

@Clover the Clever  
After a relatively small test, it seems the problem occurs when you post as background pony rather than having a name. As in, unless you use a name, you will get notified somebody is responding, which of course would be you. Interesting.

After playing around with this feature, it seems that it tells you that some random person commented on an image that you also happened to comment on.
 
I think a more effective use of this feature would be if it only alerted you that someone commented on your comment specifically (as opposed to a general comment not directed to you).  
If I wanted to read what others said in the image, I’d just click the damn image again :P

@Goldenpwny  
I don’t know, I keep watching pictures where I haven’t commented upon because the conversation takes interesting turns.

@Background Pony
 
Aright, that’s fine. You can specifically “watch” those images.  
But lets say you only want to be alerted if someone commented on your comment. A notification system that is either configured to alert you to replies or can be configured to do so (in the User’s settings) would be a valuable improvement to the site.

Oh and a little thumbnail of the image next to the notification would be awesome! :D

Alert on reply is a much more complex thing, sadly, so while it might be helpful to have at present it’d be a heck of a thing to try to implement. Bear in mind this thing has to scale quite well - we get roughly 35 requests every second on the site backend on average under load, and a good chunk of those are for notification updates, and a good chunk of those trigger the creation of notifications. We’ve designed the system to scale well (and it’s had no real impact on site load thus far) but adding user-specific processing would have a real impact on threads/images where a lot of people post/subscribe.
 
We might be able to do it at some point but we’d have to rethink how we do replies a little.

Fair enough, thanks for considering it.

Something just occurred to me: wouldn’t it be a good idea to make you watch pictures you upload?

TSP actually brought this up last night and I’ll add it later along with another configuration option to let users toggle that behaviour.

Okay, I have a few thoughts about the notification system (I am aware it’s still in beta, that’s why I’m writing here).
 
First, the way the numbers go up without refreshing the page, and then go back to zero the moment you refresh the page or go to another one (regardless of whether you checked these notifications or not) is completely confusing and makes no sense.
 
Second, is there a way to set notifications about certain images as ignored? It’s kind of annoying, constantly seeing notifications about comments in this image >>301655, even though I am no longer interested in it. Some sort of thumbnails would be handy too, instead of numbers.

@DoucheClop  
You know you can unsuscribed from pics, correct? It’s by the side of the down button.

@Background Pony  
Oh. So THAT’S what this button is for…
 
Thanks.

The number jumping on page load should be fixed now.

Thank you Clover, it seems to work now. :)
 
One thing though, I don’t know if it’s intended, but it notifies us also about the comments we just made ourselves under pictures. Or maybe it does only when we do that as BPs? I’ll need to test it…

I’d like to be able to unsub from pics/threads from the notification panel