Forums » Help » Tried clearing my notifications

I tried to clear my cache and went from two pages of notifications to around ten. It might just be because I'm still new to the site, but shouldn't clearing them actually leave me with an empty notifications page?

It's a bit more complicated than that! Let me try my best to explain.

To start off with, notifications always appear on your feed. They don't go away unless you unsubscribe from every topic or go to Dashboard > My Friends and uncheck every checkbox and alter your settings. It's very inefficient though, so I don't recommend it.

To avoid a huge lag on the site, notifications are loaded and then stored in a cache on the site. Every time you look at the notifications, only new ones will be added to the cache and displayed, rather than having the site search through the entire database every single time. It's like how a browser stores images, instead of loading images from the internet all the time, images are cached to make loading quicker and require less bandwith. Notifications work in a similar way!

You've recently friended a bunch of people, so when you cleared your cache, the site started fetching EVERYTHING people have been doing for the past couple of months and put that in your notifications feed. That's why you gained additional pages of notifications. You initially only had notifications from when you added people to your friendlist, but when you cleared the cache the site found the rest of the stuff.

So what happened is actually supposed to happen.

Clearing notifications is usually only necessary when you unfriend people, leave a group, unsubscribe from topics etc. and end up seeing old notifications from these people and places. It just really refreshes the cache, I suppose is the easiest way to put it.

I wish I had known that before I clicked to clear my cache. It seems... weird that it does that. Guess I'm used to 'clear' actually meaning clear!

Thanks for explaining though, it helps.

In that way it's also similar to a facebook feed - what your friends say and do stays around even after you've looked at it. There's no way to end up with a blank facebook either, except by unfriending everyone!

The "clear cache" option is just there in case it gets stuck and you need to jog it loose, just like Sanne said.

It might be useful to clarify what a cache is. A cache, in computer science terms, is sort of like a subsection of a larger data storage that can be accessed faster than said system. Here's an example: when you browse the internet, your browser will save webpages (images, text, etc.) to a cache. When you return to these pages, if they're still in the cache, they load MUCH faster because you aren't actually redownloading everything.

It's the same way with RPR's notifications, I assume. The entirety of your notifications are stored on the server in some way. Then there is a cache, a smaller subsection of notifications (probably recent ones), that can be accessed much faster. Clearing your cache only deletes what is saved there, so then everything will have to get redownloaded the long way (like a fresh start).