On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 04:04 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

NEW: When viewing a database table, pin the header at the top of the page.

titles still scroll up and disappear in both list and map modes
 
--

Bob Bellizzi

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 06:04 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

NEW: When viewing a database table, pin the header at the top of the page.

Not working for me.  Tried 4 different tables on 2 groups. (Win7 with Firefox)

Thanks,
Duane

Changes to the site this week:

• CHANGE: Various moderator email and push notification cleanups.
• NEW: When viewing a database table, pin the header at the top of the page.
• BUGFIX: When deleting a database row from the /table view, we did not log that in the activity log.
• NEW: New Moderator Notifications for changes to Chats/Photos/Files/Wikis/Databases. Currently in testing.

Note: I will be on vacation next week, although I plan on enabling the new moderator notifications for everyone on Monday if there are no issues found during testing over the weekend.

Take care everyone.

Mark

When a user has the Following Only radio button selected on the Advanced Preferences screen, they should be able to follow a topic by clicking on a "Follow" button at the bottom of each message.

Currently, there's a Follow link in emails, but not elsewhere, AFAIK.

This was discussed last fall here: https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/topic/46661487?p=Created,,,20,2,0,0. 

Tom 

On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 06:05 AM, Peter Rawbone wrote:

Is it possible to ‘freeze’ the top row of a database a la Excel etc?  It is particularly irksome when editing or viewing an entry and then wondering what the column is?  If you get my drift.

Done.

Cheers, Mark

Andy,

Which sort of comes back to Chris' point that the notifications work
in different ways

Vive la différence!

The underlying mechanisms are in fact different in a relevant way.

The email notifications stack up in my Inbox all day long until I get around to looking; hence the reaction people had in the first day about they and their members being "bombarded", "flooded", and other descriptions of an undesirable excess of notifications.

The web notifications are transient: here and gone on my screen in a few seconds. They don't need combining because they don't build up anywhere. I'm not sure how the app notifications will be, hopefully they won't stack up in the notification bar.

That said, I think the combiner could be modified to have an immediate "first out" if that were desirable. I had advocated such a thing, but I'm no longer so concerned about it. It would preserve immediacy in a low-activity group, but it might add to the overall complexity and apparent inconsistency of Groups.io behavior.

Shal

Mark,

All notification titles now are prefixed by the group's subject tag.

Hm... That will take some getting used to. Not saying it is a bad idea.

Now they look so much more like ordinary group messages. By eye my first reaction to my Inbox was "how did all these messages post without approval notifications?" It took a moment to realize half of them /were/ notifications, not messages.

I'd almost recommend including "Notice:" in that prefix, but that seems a bit heavyweight. "Note:"? "Nt:"? Is there a standard abbreviation or latin import that would suit? "nb:" is almost right.

Shal

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 12:03 PM, Andy Wedge wrote:

By virtue of the fact that notifications by email are effectively being held back by the combiner then yes, they are being delayed. If the combiner wasn't there, they would be sent immediately. 

Ah; I see the point you are making.

However, having thought about it over lunch, I have come to the conclusion that from my perspective it really doesn't matter. I honestly cannot see why a delay - reportedly 4 minutes - makes any difference at all. If OTOH it helps cut down the number of individual notifications about the same subject then I'm all for it, and that explains why I suggested in my earlier post that 4 minutes might not be long enough. 

A notification delay doesn't even make it into the list of Top Twenty Things That Annoy Me. (FWIW nothing about Groups.io makes it into that list!)

I am "out" for some of the time on most days, but of course that means I don't see things that happen on Groups.io in real time. It really doesn't matter if I have to play catch - up later.

In what way is life diminished by any such delay?

Chris

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 11:15 AM, Chris Jones wrote:

But is there any evidence that suggests Groups.io is slowing down email deliveries,

By virtue of the fact that notifications by email are effectively being held back by the combiner then yes, they are being delayed. If the combiner wasn't there, they would be sent immediately.  I understand that once Groups.io has actually deigned to transmit an email it's down to the vagaries of the internet,

Andy

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 10:57 AM, Andy Wedge wrote:

I think having a choice of whether I want a push notification or an email (or both) is great; slowing down the delivery of emails (unless the receiver is in control) is not.

But is there any evidence that suggests Groups.io is slowing down email deliveries, even taking into account your other points about possible delays due to polling differences? Every now and then some emails seem to be held up somewhere along the route; on occasions I have had messages turn up post - moderation before the (email) notification that there was something awaiting moderation put in an appearance.

Yes; it's a bit annoying but c'est la vie... <shrug>

Chris

PS to Mark; thanks for turning my push notifications on; I got the first one this morning. For some reason the group I moderate has gone super - quiet in the last few days so I had to wait for something to happen. A nice, clear, clean, unmistakeable appearance. :)

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 09:45 AM, Chris Jones wrote:

The only solutions (not ones that I am suggesting that Mark should implement, nice as they might be) would be one in which the notification was sent after (say) 10 minutes inactivity on the part of the originator, or perhaps one whereby the originator was prompted by Send Notification Now? somewhere.

Or even better, allow the combiner to be turned off and/or the delay to moderator controlled

I suspect that the "inconsistency" is down to the intervals at which an email client polls

No, the inconsistency I was referring to is the spacing between events listed in one notification email from Groups.io

the default setting on the email client (Outlook) was 30 minutes. My preference is for something rather shorter so I have set it to 10 minutes

It has always been my understanding, and my own testing seems to back this up, that those send/receive time intervals apply to IMAP and POP3 collections. If you have Exchange accounts in Outlook (which my main ones are) then the mail collection is triggered by an email arriving at the Exchange server, so the send/receive intervals don't apply anyway. For all the IMAP email accounts I have defined in Outlook, the send/receive interval is set at 2 minutes. So, before this combiner process kicked in, I'd get two notifications almost simultaneously, one in Outlook and one in Firefox. I think having a choice of whether I want a push notification or an email (or both) is great; slowing down the delivery of emails (unless the receiver is in control) is not.

Regards,
Andy

Andy

On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 11:20 PM, Andy Wedge wrote:

I don't like this combiner approach with a 4 minute delay. <snip> If the combiner delay was something more reasonable, say 30 seconds, that would be better as I can understand the need to combine some quick-fire changes into one notice, however, 4 minutes is way to long me and I'd rather have the option to turn the combiner off than have that.

and later wrote: The spacing on the email notification for certain events is not consistent...

I can easily come up with with a counter - argument that 4 minutes isn't nearly long enough, say if someone is creating a new album. 4 minutes may not be enough to upload all the relevant photos, let along go back and perhaps edit the photo names and add some descriptive text. If that is the case the new album may not be ready - to - eat for perhaps 30 minutes or more, in which case a 4 minute aggregated notification will be somewhat premature, and 30 seconds definitely so.

The only solutions (not ones that I am suggesting that Mark should implement, nice as they might be) would be one in which the notification was sent after (say) 10 minutes inactivity on the part of the originator, or perhaps one whereby the originator was prompted by Send Notification Now? somewhere.

Moving to the later point... I suspect that the "inconsistency" is down to the intervals at which an email client polls the mail provider's server. The PC on which I am typing this was set up less than a fortnight ago,  and the default setting on the email client (Outlook) was 30 minutes. My preference is for something rather shorter so I have set it to 10 minutes, but even that is enough for an apparent inconsistency to appear; if a notification arrives just before a poll then the email delivery will seem to be immediate, while if it just misses a poll the delivery will be 10 minutes "late".

Not much Groups.io can do about that...

Chris

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 02:37 AM, Shal Farley wrote:

I was concerned with the first-out delay time introduced by the combiner, but now I think I may be fine with it, given that push notifications are still immediate.

Which sort of comes back to Chris' point that the notifications work in different ways https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25572

Some other things I have noticed:

• push notifications do not identify the (sub)group that the activity took place in. As I am in multiple groups and my main group has 20+ subgroups, knowing which (sub)group the activity took place in is kind of important.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The spacing on the email notification for certain events is not consistent:
  
  
  
  
  
• The HTML code for some table descriptions is shown:
  
  

Regards,
Andy

Mark,

Should be fixed now.

Yup. But this is wrong for a wholly different reason...

> To: Shals2nd"s Display Name <shals2nd@...>
> From: main@shalstest.groups.io Notification <main@shalstest.groups.io>
> Subject: [shalstest] File /Never had a folder before./0-stories.txt uploaded

You knew I had to try it.

Amusingly it seems to have revealed a bug in Thunderbird:

I'm not sure but it looks like it thought the quote lead in a qtext that slurped up the email address proper, leaving the email address part empty.

Didn't fool Gmail's web interface though:

Shal

Mark,

The new moderator notifications have been turned on for those who
asked.

#bug

In my test group my display name has an apostrophe in it. And, well, yeah:

To: Shals2nd&#39;s Display Name <shals2nd@gmail.com>
From: main@shalstest.groups.io Notification <main@shalstest.groups.io>
Subject: [shalstest] Photo IMGP7434 Saturn.jpg uploaded

Gotta love HTML.

Shal

Andy,

I don't like this combiner approach with a 4 minute delay. It seems to
me that we have a sharp new system to send out immediate notifications
and then we blunt that by delaying them.

OTOH if you want immediacy you can enable it as a web/app notification. That's even faster than prompt email delivery.
https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25544

Of course, that won't help you (yet) when using the mobile app.

I was concerned with the first-out delay time introduced by the combiner, but now I think I may be fine with it, given that push notifications are still immediate.

Shal