Notifications

In past Misago used to have notifications feature but it was dropped during the grand rewrite of 2014. Since then I have planned to bring this feature back, but I've always had more important things to do, eventually resulting in this feature not happening.

Well, not anymore because the time is finally upon us and notifications are now priority thing I've started working on as we speak.

The plan is to implement new notifications framework for all Misago's notifications needs and for first release implement an MVP of notifications that only supports notifications about new replies to threads.

Notifications will live in misago.notifications module and will cover both in-app notifications and email sending.

GitHub pull request with the work: #1536

Couple other ideas for notifications:

Getting notified when you are mentioned in a post, selecting if you want notifications from everyone or just users you follow.

Getting notified when user you follow starts thread or posts reply, sounds cool when you have user who posts high value content but does it rarely.

Getting mentioned when your post is liked. Limiting this to likes by those you are following.

Getting notifed of moderator doing something with your content. Deleting your thread, moving it to other category or splitting your post into new thread.

Getting notified about new user following you.

Getting notified about your post being selected as an answer to question.

Just a sneak peek at new notifications preferences:

Over the long weekend here I've managed to find enough time to implement most of notifications API, and now I've started to work on the UI:

I'll now focus on completing the UI for notifications and replacing existing "subscriptions" UI with "watched threads". After UI is in place, I'll move to having thread replies use this new notifications framework.

Not in first release, but once plugin hooks from v4 are ported over to current codebase, I agree "notify about X" functions should be replace-able by the plugins.

There's also question of enabling plugins to fiddle in the JS. I know how to do it, but that's kind of a tall order currently because it will require moving assets build step to misago-docker. I hope I'll be able to get that in later in the summer or after that tho.

Another week, another milestone. Notifications dropdown and page with all notifications!

Yup, I know there are two notification buttons in navbar! One of those buttons opens notificatins dropdown while the other is for full-screen notifications list, which is used on small screens. I'll add logic for hiding right button when I am finished with testing and designing.

As part of the work on notifications I’ll also update the navbar. It no longer uses bootstrap components, it collapses nav options into dropdown so I’ll be able to fit more of them into it (for example, hamburger menu may include links to categories too)

Notorious "Disabled" button has been replaced with new "Watch" button which changes to "Watching" when user enables notification for new replies in thread:

Another important milestone reached: New notifications logic for threads replies has been implemented and posting process now uses it in place of old one.

Best thing about new implementation is that this logic is now part separate process (tasks queue) and not main HTTP process. Reply authors no longer have to wait for Misago to notify all thread watchers about new reply being posted by them before they are redirected to their reply 👏 Also, if there's an error while notifying one of watchers about new reply, this watcher will be simply skipped and forum will still notify other watchers.

I will now move to adding notifications when users are added to private threads.

There's now hope that new notifications will be released before May ends🤞

New notification logic for private threads has been implemented. As with notifications about new replies, this one is part of separate process, making posting of private threads snappier and more error-proof than it was before.

Final feature for notifications framework MVP that I want to implement is adding "Click here to stop receiving emails with notifications from this thread" links to notification e-mails. After those are in I'll focus on code polishing and cleanups.

I want to ship notifications sooner than later so I can put it in users hands and enable them to test it.

Notifications MVP is feature complete 🎉

What remains to do now is to write data integrity guards for scenarios when threads or users are moved or deleted and benchmark the implementation.

Implementation is complete and I've started benchmarking. After I am happy with benchmarks results, I'll do one more test pass to see how those features are working, and then I'll make an release.

104 commits, 369 files changed but notifications MVP has been merged. ✅

I will keep this thread open for discussion about future new events that should be added to notifications. There's also GitHub label for tracking notifications related work.

Known issue: sometimes notification task is executed before transaction that triggered the notification completes. This makes the task fail with "Post.DoesNotExist" error (post exists, but its not yet visible to other database connections), preventing any notifications from being sent out.

I'll add retry after 5 seconds when this happens. That should be good enough.

Github: github.com/rafalp/Misago/issues/1600