Inbox notification when downvoted question is edited

[fixer1234]

Installed Version: 1.X.X | Environment: Chrome/Tampermonkey Note: Firefox not Chrome

I believe this is tied to the token issue (reported separately), but not 100% sure. If so, this is already known and, hopefully, would disappear when the token problem is solved.

Expected Behavior

How do you expect the feature to work? Feature button to select the option on the post, plus inbox notification when the downvoted question is edited.

Actual Behavior

How is the feature currently behaving?

Feature button: This was originally an eyeball icon and my recollection is that the icon was replaced by a text link as one of the actions under the question. That part worked in previous versions but is missing in v2.0.1 (perhaps now a function of the token?).

Notification: This part never worked for me. I think this is the feature that the token is required for and that piece never worked, so the notification didn't. The token is still not working (different issue already reported), so I assume that's what underlies the problem with this feature.

Error Logs

SOX errors are logged to the browser console, if possible, please post those here.

I'll collect these if needed, but my understanding is that the problem is known (token).

Steps to reproduce

What steps did you take to reproduce the issue?

Went to a question I had downvoted to test the feature, but was unable to test because of the missing button.

[shu8]

That's been fixed in the latest version (I think it's P now). You can install it using any links I've ever given in these issues :) (I'm not on my computer atm so can't give you the link!)

On 5 Nov 2016 10:25 p.m., "fixer1234" notifications@github.com wrote:

@shu8 https://github.com/shu8 Very minor bug discovered with this feature. The new message box is open when opening the SU chat room selection page (http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&host=superuser.com). It covers parts of 4 chat rooms, so it has to be closed to use the page. So far, that's the only page I've seen the symptom on.

[image: su chatrooms] https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/10065766/20033980/36ce77f4-a385-11e6-96f1-6e31746c2011.png

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/soscripted/sox/issues/98#issuecomment-258646492, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AIcNjtJm8FRSKqOIvE5U9vmaCnPTw5iSks5q7QJugaJpZM4JjzDn .

[shu8]

@fixer1234 I didn't think about the colour being a problem.. sorry! do you have any thoughts on what I could use instead of colour? because I realise that different people can't see different colours...

regarding the extra info, I'll add the:

• editor
• Q/A
• edit time

in the next version, but I don't get what you mean about the indicator (your last bullet point)..?

The API doesn't return the edit comment AFAIK, so I don't think I'll be able to add that

---

I think adding separate notifications for each edit is going to get really complicated and would cause users who use the feature to just rely on the editor to decide whether they should go look at the post again or not. I think it's best to just have a notification if the post was edited at all, and if it is, then the user should go to the post and check it out.

I do kind of see your point in seeing the advantage of seeing all the different edits, but I think that would just get too complicated TBH.

Also, what do you think of changing the link of the notification to the revision page rather than the question page? that would make users more likely to see the difference...

[shu8]

@fixer1234 I've added those into dev z :)

Can you see how it works for you? :)

[fixer1234]

@shu8 I'll load dev z today and test. re: bullet points and questions --

• status indicator referred to whether the Notify on edit selection is still active on the post (way to see that in the message window without needing to go back to the post).

  As an aside, that's another case where the color change isn't very visible if you're color blind, mainly because the font used as the button is thin and there isn't a lot of color in one spot. It would be more visible if the button text went to bold in addition to the color change, or even change the button to display the eyeball icon instead of the Notify on edit text when it is active.

  My bullet suggested adding the eyeball icon to the notification in the message box if the feature is enabled on the associated post.

• re: edit comment, not sure I understand this one. Here's what I was referring to. SOX has a working feature to display the edit comment on hover, which it captures when the page is loaded. I was referring to making this part of the message content, similar to how an excerpt of a normal comment is used as the "body" of the message in the regular message inbox.

  Regular comments are stored and indexed by SE, so they can be directly retrieved. I'm assuming that for watched posts that are edited and therefore generate a message, SOX would need to capture the edit comment the same way it does for the hover feature, and then store this itself for use in the message window.

• re: color of the top bar icon, there are a number of potential ways to improve this. Red-green color blindness is by far the most common, and even for non-color blind people, red is not the most visible color. Green is the most visible color, but that's not easy for red-green color blind people to differentiate. Low sensitivity to blue or yellow is pretty rare, so using pure blue or yellow for the active state vs. grey for the inactive state is better.

  The amount and concentration of color is also a big factor. If the icon or text is composed of thin lines, so there isn't a lot of color in one spot, it's hard to see differences in color. The mod diamond works because it's blue and is a substantial blob of color. So using an icon with substantial uninterrupted mass, or switching to bold text for "active", makes the color more visible (in addition to a change in appearance). Changing the background color of the icon would be another way to make it very visible. Completely changing the symbol (e.g., Notify on edit text to an eyeball icon when active), is pretty foolproof.

• Re: separate notifications, I don't know the mechanics of how you generate or filter the notifications, so there isn't much I can comment. I had envisioned just adding a notification to the message box any time a different author edited the post; the user would be responsible for deleting what they considered obsolete or redundant messages.

  Here's the main issue. The message is the link to the post for the user to be able to get back to it later, so users will keep the notification in the message box after looking at the edit. If no subsequent edits are reflected in the notification window, the user will never know about new edits, so the feature would no longer serve its purpose. So some mechanism is needed for the user to be aware of subsequent edits. Some potential solutions:

  1. If you want just one notification displayed per post, display only the newest notification. Particularly if you are including the editor ID and edit time, that will be a pretty good indicator.
  2. Add some type of indicator flag to the message that indicates the existence of one or more edits after the last time the user either visited the post or looked in the message box (not sure if this is something capturable).

[fixer1234]

@shu8 Quick question. You mentioned that this version includes some form of Q vs A identifier in the message box. For all notifications, I'm seeing a cool icon, thread title, editor, edit date/time, and a delete button, but no obvious Q vs. A identifier. Am I missing something or is this a bug? example:

I believe there were both question edits. Just got my first notification of an answer edit and it looks the same.

[shu8]

@fixer1234 sorry, my bad - I forgot to actually add the q/a! fixed in dev ab

This has a 'enable debugging' toggle in the dialog that you need to ENABLE in order for any console logs to appear -- please do so if you post any bug reports! :)

---

I'll start adding your suggestions in starting from the next version :)

[shu8]

@fixer1234 How's it looking now in dev ar? :)

I've...:

• changed the red topbar icon to blue
• change the topbar icon to get bolder when it is showing a new message has popped up
• added an 'eye' to the notification to show whether watching is still active
• made sure the 'Q'/'A' is shown
• fixed the links -- they were actually often wrong links(!) :/

---

The problem with the edit comment thing is that the feature you're talking about which shows the edit comment as a tooltip only works on the current site because it manually scrapes the page for the edit comment.

Now, I could technically scrape for the edit comment in this feature as well, but, that would only work for edits on the current site (ie. if a question on SU was edited but I was on SO, then Javascript won't let me access another domain 😞) and it would be really inconsistent between sites then :/

[fixer1234]

@shu8 Good stuff. I'll load it and check it out.

Interesting info on the edit comments. A few thoughts:

• Many (most?) users predominantly use a single site. For example, 99+% of my SE time is on SU; I venture to other sites for specific, unusual needs. So a current site limitation might not be a limitation at all for many users.

• For users who do frequent a number of different sites, site-based comments could still be useful (when you go to a site, the comments for that site are visible). Not quite a consolidated message box, but you need to go to the site to see the posts, anyway, so it would still be useful.

• I'm wondering whether there might be a workaround for sharing the comments across sites. Some ideas:

  • SOX parses links across sites (is that because the information is available via a different, live, mechanism that doesn't work for the comments?)

  • SOX stores it's own preferences and applies them across sites. Could the relevant comments be scraped and stored centrally in a similar manner?

  • Could you use something like browser cookies to store the scraped comments and access them across sites? Most people don't use multiple browsers concurrently, and this would limit the access to the same computer, but isn't that already the case for this feature, anyway?

[shu8]

@fixer1234 never mind, I think I've got a nice workaround... I'll update you after I've tried it :)

[shu8]

@fixer1234 Turns out I was completely wrong! There is a revisions API method! 😮 I have no idea how I ever missed that!

But the good news is; I've added the revision comment to the notification now, from dev ax onwards! 😃

Just hover over the question title in the notification and the tooltip will be the revision comment :)

I'm going to close this issue now, because it's no longer broken, but feel free to comment back if anything's still missing! :)

[fixer1234]

@shu8 Haven't done exhaustive testing yet, but this is shaping up to be a very complete and polished mini-app. Most of the features work great. A few minor glitches:

• The topbar icon doesn't reflect anything. To me, all of the SE and SOX icons look grey on a black topbar in their "inactive" state. The moderator diamond turns visibly blue if there are new Meta questions. This message box icon doesn't get bold or change to blue when there are messages. So that feature doesn't appear to be working.

• This may just be a limitation, but a number of elements don't update until the page is refreshed. I'll have to review the presence or deletion of the messages, themselves (I made a note that refresh is required for the message box to update, and now I don't recall the specific details). But the eyeball indicator I know is not updated until a refresh. On the post, itself, clicking the Notify on edit button changes color immediately, but the bold text (a really nice addition, BTW), doesn't appear until a refresh.

  Needing a page refresh isn't a big deal if people are aware of it, but if message box changes could be independent of the page, the status shown would be more "reliably accurate" (like the way the new message counter and the post ages on the main page update without refreshing the page).

• Notification is never immediate. Enabling Notify on edit and then doing an edit, doesn't produce a message immediately or within a few minutes. But it does show up in a reasonable time.

• One action I haven't had a chance to test yet, I'm wondering how it is intended to work: Say I enable Notify on edit, perform an edit, and then deselect Notify on edit before the message appears. Does the edit immediately register and it is just the populating of the message box that's periodic (so it will still show up), or is the presence of an edit scanned for periodically and the message immediately populated, so if Notify on edit is not enabled at scan time, there will be no message?

• I edited a tag wiki and noticed that the Notify on edit button was there. The situation was that I saw a proposed wiki edit in a review queue and wanted to propose another change after that review was complete. I went to the tag wiki page and enabled Notify on edit to be alerted when the review was complete. That edit was approved, but there was no notification, and the Notify on edit button was no longer enabled.

  It would be handy if this worked, but I'm sort of not surprised that it didn't. Wasn't sure if the wiki editor just shares some hooks so the button appears even though you don't expect it to work there, or it works only for edits by users with sufficient rep to not need review, or it should work there but doesn't.

[shu8]

@fixer1234 thanks! I'll look into the first 3 bullet points

• about your 4th one: as soon as you unwatch a post, the script won't check for edits on it at all again. (it checks every 15 minutes btw). so you were right in saying if Notify on edit is not enabled at scan time, there will be no message.

• about your 5th one: it's not supposed to work on tag wikis yet -- I'll try and disable the button on those pages. I just think the use case for tag wikis is much smaller than normal posts, and a bit more complicated because of the way they work. Either way, it's not on my todo list at the moment, at least! :)

[fixer1234]

@shu8 Now using Dev J and running into some buggy behavior with a number of aspects of this feature.

First some misc. observations:

• When an edit is saved locally, or an external edit has occurred and you click the warning that there was an edit, click to refresh the page, the Notify on edit button disappears (regardless of whether active). Refreshing the page restores it. A direct tag edit (>10K rep feature) does not affect the button, but those actions are not fully reflected until a page refresh, anyway.

• The position of the Notify on edit button is not uniform. It is to the right of the action buttons at the bottom of the post except for posts marked as a duplicate, in which case it's below the action buttons.

• The Notify on edit button immediately goes bold now, no page refresh required.

• I assume the new number of messages icon now replaces the bold/blue icon change when messages are present?

• All I ever saw was a (1). Is that a fixed icon that represents any count (i.e., non-empty), or is that supposed to show a message count?

• If it is a count, does the count represent the total messages in the box or the number of unread messages (new since the box was last viewed)?

The rest of the input is a bit complex, with a lot of different behaviors, so I'll just relate the sequence of events:

• Notify on edit was active on two messages in the Edit review queue. I'll refer to them as Post1 and Post2. I left both tabs open. Eventually, I returned to the Post1 tab and found that it had been approved; it had the warning message that the post had been edited, click to refresh.

• Clicking that button showed the edited post and the topbar icon immediately changed to (1). I didn't open the box yet because I wanted to see how the count would be affected by Post2.

• I clicked to some other open SU tabs. The message box on those still showed the old icon, which didn't change if I refreshed the page. I returned to the Post1 tab; it was the only one that showed the (1) icon. It was the active tab when the icon changed.

• Still on Post1, and assuming the Post1 message was in the box, I deselected Notify on Edit. The (1) icon immediately disappeared and it returned to the old icon.

• I went to the Post2 tab. That one had also been approved and had the warning message about clicking to refresh to see the edit. I clicked it, the post refreshed, registering the edit, but the topbar icon did not change to indicate the presence or increase of messages.

• At that point, I opened the message box on Post2. There was no message about Post1, only a message for Post2. No way to know whether there was ever a Post1 message, or some action caused it to be deleted.

• I deselected Notify on edit on Post2, refreshed the page and the message was still there (with the eyeball now gone). This would seem to point to some interaction with the new topbar icon, in which displaying that icon caused the message not to be populated.

• I had done some other watched edits, and checked periodically for a change in the topbar icon to indicate that the message had been produced. There was never any icon change on any of those tabs. So I started periodically checking the message box. About 20 minutes after another edit, a second message appeared in the box.

• When I left Post1, it was displaying the old icon. After the activity described above, I returned to Post1, and it was displaying the (1) icon again (triggered by the edit that produced the second message?). I refreshed the page, and the (1) icon disappeared; replaced with the old icon. Both of the messages remained in the box.

• There were about half a dozen other watched edits. At the time of writing this, it's going on 2 hours since those edits, but no others have produced a message.

There are so many different strange things on so many different pages, I'm not sure where to start in terms of capturing console output. I figured some of this would probably be diagnostic of some programming oversights or common denominators, which might narrow the focus.

Should we reopen this issue, or since they're new bugs related to different code, should they be a new issue?

[fixer1234]

@shu8 I'll add to the saga:

• After completing the above post, I deselected Notify on edit on all of the open tabs and deleted the messages in the box. There were several edited post still actively watched where I had accidentally closed the tab earlier, so I couldn't find them to deselect watching.

• I enabled Notify on edit on several new edits. Roughly 2 minutes after one of those edits, the (1) icon popped up on the page I happened to be on (review queue). The message box contained two messages. The lower one was from several hours ago, one of the "lost" actively watched edits. The upper one was one of the new edits.

• The second new edit was not included. Going to that post, I found the Notify on edit button deselected (not by me).

• Again, the message box was limited to 2 messages.

• I cleaned up again, deselecting watching on the reported edits and deleting both messages.

• I went back to the SU main page and just on a whim, checked the message box. It contained another lost watched edit from 3 hours ago.

Experiment 3:

• Cleared everything again. Opened three questions for tag edits. Verified each one as having an empty message box and Notify on edit selected. Edited the tags on each one but didn't hit save. Then one after the other, double checked the edit, verified it was still set to watch, and clicked save. So three edits were saved in less than a one-minute period.

• Based on your earlier description, I wanted to check whether if watching was selected after the actual edit, it would still be reported as long as watching was selected before the polling took place. Within a couple of minutes of completing the three edits, I opened a 4th post to edit. Immediately, the (1) icon appeared.

• The message box contained the 1st of the three edits. Going to each of the three post tabs, the message box on each one was empty. When I refreshed each page, the 1st edit had it's message appear. The other two also showed just the 1st edit in the message box, and both of their Notify on edit buttons were deselected after the refresh.

• I cleared the three edits. On the 4th, I did the tag edit and then immediately enabled Notify on edit. Then I opened another post, watched it, and did a tag edit. I returned to the test post (4th), refreshed the page, and immediately got the (1) icon and the Notify on edit was disabled (which also means no test result on watching after the edit). Opening the message box, the last edit from less than a minute before was listed (the only message).

Experiment 4 (message box content limitations):

• Message box had one message for a watched edit. I watched about half a dozen other edits. None were added to the box.

• I unwatched the reported post. A second edit message was added (this one watched). No 3rd message.

• I unwatched the 2nd post. A third post was added (this one watched). No 4th post.

• I unwatched the 3rd post. No additional messages were added.

• I deleted one message (two remaining, both unwatched). With the page refresh, the next two edits became unwatched. No messages were added.

• I deleted another message (one remaining, unwatched). No messages were added.

• There were frequent new tabs and page refreshes. With a refresh 13 minutes after the next post edit in the lineup, one more message was added (watched).

• I unwatched that message. No more messages were added.

[shu8]

I just noticed something from one of your console dumps in another issue: the live feature doesn't work for meta posts right now. That might be the cause for some, but not all, of these issues?

[fixer1234]

@shu8 That might also be a problem, but none of what I tested involved Meta posts.

[fixer1234]

@shu8 I had to switch back to the 2.0.2 official version because of the FF hanging problem. It has this feature in the menu, but no Notify on edit buttons on the posts and no separate message box (well, actually, the main SU page has no extra message box, but the review queues page and the user profile page do have the extra message box, so figure that one out; all of the pages have been refreshed).

It's hard to reconstruct the history, but it seems like at some point, the basic functionality was working (maybe late November-early December?). Then there were a bunch of enhancements and basic changes and we ran into a new batch of problems. So it isn't clear whether for v2.0.2, you rolled things back to the basic functionality or just partially disabled the feature. Is your expectation that this feature should work in v2.0.2 (with no bells or whistles), or it's disabled and on hold for debugging?

[shu8]

@fixer1234 I'm not sure to be honest 😕

I think it should have been working; I closed this 13 days ago and pushed to master 12 days ago... :/

Nevertheless, I'm working on your FF crash bug, your hint about it being to do with the comments seems right... working on it

[shu8]

Replacing this feature with #215. Closing.