Posted by Kim on August 2, 2010, 4:34am
Behold! While I was away at the coast this week I had a lot of time to sit and think while waiting to pull my crab traps up, and couldn't resist sketching out some new logic for the dashboard notification system, and the first phase of that re-engineering has now gone live. You should see an immediate leap in functionality starting tonight.Notifications now do much more than just keep track of friend connections. They'll now also keep you apprised of when your friends add new images to their galleries, create new characters, add new game tags, get a feature, and a bunch of other things. It's also a lot smarter about grouping similar events into one, so if one of your friends goes out and makes 20 connections at once, it'll all get consolidated into one message.
Over the next few days, expect more features and new settings to appear that will allow you to fine tune which notifications you're interested in seeing.
This was also part of laying the tracks for the soon to be released forums. The notification system should now be robust enough to help you keep track of where your friends are posting and who is replying to your threads as soon as the forums go live.
UPDATE (Aug 2nd): If you visit your settings (There's a link on the submenu on your dashboard) you should now be able to decide which types of notifications you want to see.
Comments
Length or width?
It's sort of difficult to gauge how many and how big they should be lengthwise, what with different screens and different resolutions. It always looks titchy on my big monitor, but is quite lengthy on my laptop. I'm trying to remove the guess work on averages for me by making it so that people can pick the number of notifications they want piped in at a time. There's an option in your settings. Does that help?
Font size also got reduced earlier today, which does seem to work better.
It's sort of difficult to gauge how many and how big they should be lengthwise, what with different screens and different resolutions. It always looks titchy on my big monitor, but is quite lengthy on my laptop. I'm trying to remove the guess work on averages for me by making it so that people can pick the number of notifications they want piped in at a time. There's an option in your settings. Does that help?
Font size also got reduced earlier today, which does seem to work better.
@ Kim: I was actually talking about the amount of space the text took on the page. It was in fact pointed out before, if my memory serves... but I was thinking maybe making it into a separate page (like on deviantArt) would help a great deal; keeping a few "featured" messages on the dashboard, but showing up in smaller font size (location at the user's discretion?), might also be useful.
Thanks for the cool updates!
Fantastic !
@Chromakin -- Yes, filters are for sure on their way, and soon! That is the next stage of updating and fine tuning the new notifications, right after I am no longer distracted by bug reports left waiting while I was out of town. 
I'm not quite sure which part of notifications you're referring to as oversized, though, so I have no idea if I can fix that for you or not. Too many showing on one page? Text showing up too big? Taking too long to load? Individual sentences in use to describe the actions too long?
@Ethelle -- Woohoo! Glad it's working. That it pulls images right onto the dash is for sure my favorite part of the new system. Visual aids for the win.
I'm not quite sure which part of notifications you're referring to as oversized, though, so I have no idea if I can fix that for you or not. Too many showing on one page? Text showing up too big? Taking too long to load? Individual sentences in use to describe the actions too long?@Ethelle -- Woohoo! Glad it's working. That it pulls images right onto the dash is for sure my favorite part of the new system. Visual aids for the win.
This is great news! 8D I've just seen the new system at work, when I added an image to the gallery of one of my characters. I liked how it showed the actual added image as well, which is a neat little detail!
Cool! This site is getting to be much more functional every passing update!
Can't wait for less oversized notifications and the notification filter (if any).
Can't wait for less oversized notifications and the notification filter (if any).
Chromakin
August 5, 2010
9:54pm