The News & Notifications System

2021 Feb 23

For a long time, I've been the most informed person on SWAG about new content, new comments, etc. I have a bunch of administrative tools that make it possible for me to see what's happening across the whole site, and as the administrator, I need something like that. However, members of the site need similar information and have never had access to it. Today I'm changing that.

For the past couple of weeks I've been playing with the notion of a notification system for informing members of the site about information they might be interested in. Now, when you post a new blog, forum post or image, you're going to be subscribed to updates about comments on those posts. You can also follow other people's posts by either commenting on them, or you can look for the "Follow" link. I've tried to make these links fairly obvious, but they need a bit more styling to make them clear and visible. Still, they're on all the content you can follow including News articles like this one.

If you're following something and wish to unsubscribe from it, there will be an "Unfollow" link. By simply clicking it, you'll no longer receive notifications in the sidebar.

I will probably write some additional code in the near future to subscribe everyone to their own content so that you can see any updates made to old posts you might not be watching any longer. It's not super common that we see comments on old content, but it does happen, and I hope, with this improvement, that everyone will find it just a bit easier to follow the threads of conversation that happen on SWAG.

I'm sure I'll find some bugs in this. If you see any, please feel free to let me know. Also feel free to subscribe yourself to any content on the site, whether you've created it or not. When I write my update scripts, they'll take this into account.

Eclipse

I've gone ahead and subscribed everyone to any content they've ever created. I'll look into what it might take to do the same for anything people have ever commented on.