FlightAware starts using :disco: :horse: Sadness ensues
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@pjh said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@the_quiet_one said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
but I've noticed its activity has gone down in the last few years. This will no doubt kill it for good.
Actually we got an uptick in participation when we moved over to Discourse...
The UI looked nicer at first (I'm not one who longs for the days of screenwidth forums), but I must admit I primarily started interacting so I could read stuff in the lounge.
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@dreikin said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
but I must admit I primarily started interacting so I could read stuff in the lounge.
INTERNETPOINTZZZZ FTW!
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I see people shit on Discourse all the time here, but I've never understood why. I use it all the time and never had any problems with it.
Go fuck a pipe cleaner with your urethra.
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@lorne-kates said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I see people shit on Discourse all the time here, but I've never understood why. I use it all the time and never had any problems with it.
Go fuck a pipe cleaner with your urethra.
What makes you think their urethra is wide/long enough to do that?
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@tsaukpaetra said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@lorne-kates said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I see people shit on Discourse all the time here, but I've never understood why. I use it all the time and never had any problems with it.
Go fuck a pipe cleaner with your urethra.
What makes you think their urethra is wide/long enough to do that?
It will be, eventually.
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@lorne-kates said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@tsaukpaetra said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@lorne-kates said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I see people shit on Discourse all the time here, but I've never understood why. I use it all the time and never had any problems with it.
Go fuck a pipe cleaner with your urethra.
What makes you think their urethra is wide/long enough to do that?
It will be, eventually.
I like where this is going!
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@kuro said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Going through that topic I noticed that @abcd567 complained about the layout on mobile and wasn't banned. What kind of sloppy Discourse instance is that?
They got to him
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@lolwhat said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@polygeekery said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@e4tmyl33t said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@the_quiet_one I did that for the Eve Online forums back when Discourse was first brought up as a potential replacement. I even mentioned this place by name if they wanted to come find the history of fuckup.
They still went with Discourse.
I see people shit on Discourse all the time here, but I've never understood why. I use it all the time and never had any problems with it.
Get. Out.
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Personally, NodeBB feels less fluid than Discourse.
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I don't understand why can't they just fix the UI? Surely all the backend work doesn't need to be trashed.
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@aapis said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I don't understand why can't they just fix the UI?
They're too busy changing the precise shade of blue used for the buttons.
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@aapis said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Surely all the backend work doesn't need to be trashed.
From what others here have said in the past.... Yeah the backend needs to be trashed as well.
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Personally, NodeBB feels less fluid than Discourse.
I'd like to hear more about what gives you that impression, as we're always on the lookout for ways to make the NodeBB experience frictionless.
...
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@julianlam
I miss:- The inability to filter posts by user in a thread
- The ability to expand the "in reply to" and see the full post that was quoted (I don't remember if that feature also let you get a backwards quote chain the same way that the forward reply button does? I don't think it did?)
- Chat messages that had first class thread status... the chat interface on mobile is very hard to work with.
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@julianlam said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Personally, NodeBB feels less fluid than Discourse.
I'd like to hear more about what gives you that impression, as we're always on the lookout for ways to make the NodeBB experience frictionless.
NodeBB feels like several pages that you navigate between. Discourse feels like one page that you use different sections of. Pages also load slower (4-5 seconds in NodeBB instead of the 0.5-1 I'm used to).
I've also, despite the constant flame against it by WTDWTF, never actually encountered a Discourse bug. Meanwhile, notifications in NodeBB may or may not open when I click on them (though it'll mark them as read anyway), it'll give thread reply notifications as 'the' notification even if there's a specific reply to me, it'll occasionally choose a miscellaneous spot to send me to instead of my actual last read location if the notification is about new replies, and a few other things which I can't remember off the top of my head but annoyed me when i noticed them.
Infinite scroll is also painful, because it doesn't load posts until you're right on top of them, and then immediately scroll up or down some amount, as opposed to Discourse which will load them much more eagerly making it a much smoother experience. And with the discrete-page thing, lack of good infinite scroll is even worse.
Really, the majority of my current beef is loading speed of various things. This also includes images, though I don't know if that's just the upload server or NodeBB itself. But NodeBB definitely plays some role, because like infinite scroll, images don't load until you're right on top of them, which immediately changes the scroll location and is extremely annoying (especially in the inspiration thread).
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Pages also load slower (4-5 seconds in NodeBB instead of the 0.5-1 I'm used to).
That depends critically on the size of threads. Our experience at the time was that Discourse loaded small threads very quickly, but really started to slow horribly once the size of threads increased. Our big problem was that when we pointed this out, 's response was to start force closing our large threads. That really soured the whole thing extremely rapidly — there were a whole bunch of things done by both sides that were nothing short of outright trolling and flaming — and once the fundamental basis of trust is gone, there's no real point in staying.
Really, the majority of my current beef is loading speed of various things. This also includes images, though I don't know if that's just the upload server or NodeBB itself. But NodeBB definitely plays some role, because like infinite scroll, images don't load until you're right on top of them, which immediately changes the scroll location and is extremely annoying (especially in the inspiration thread).
Yes. Those sorts of threads were really annoying in Discourse too FWIW.
The big problem seems to be the lack of image size information before the images are loaded, even when the images are hosted on the NodeBB server, as that means that loading the content causes the page to jump. (Same for some other types of embedded content. Fortunately the YouTube plugin seems to have the height info.)
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@dkf said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Pages also load slower (4-5 seconds in NodeBB instead of the 0.5-1 I'm used to).
That depends critically on the size of threads. Our experience at the time was that Discourse loaded small threads very quickly, but really started to slow horribly once the size of threads increased. Our big problem was that when we pointed this out, 's response was to start force closing our large threads. That really soured the whole thing extremely rapidly — there were a whole bunch of things done by both sides that were nothing short of outright trolling and flaming — and once the fundamental basis of trust is gone, there's no real point in staying.
I don't notice that behavior at all in 1k+ threads; I don't know if that's large or not. How was closing your threads on your own platform? I'm confused. Or do you mean meta.d?
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I don't notice that behavior at all in 1k+ threads; I don't know if that's large or not.
1k is mid-sized. Once it gets over 20k it's getting reasonably large.
How was closing your threads on your own platform? I'm confused. Or do you mean meta.d?
He had super-duper admin powers because we were using the hosted solution (because Discourse is moderately tricky to deploy, requiring a coordinated cluster of Docker containers IIRC).
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@dkf said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I don't notice that behavior at all in 1k+ threads; I don't know if that's large or not.
1k is mid-sized. Once it gets over 20k it's getting reasonably large.
How was closing your threads on your own platform? I'm confused. Or do you mean meta.d?
He had super-duper admin powers because we were using the hosted solution (because Discourse is moderately tricky to deploy, requiring a coordinated cluster of Docker containers IIRC).
I'd imagine Sponge's is so fast because they host their own. I don't actually know what multiple docker containers requires, but I'd imagine that it couldn't be so hard the WTDWTF folks couldn't do it .
Meanwhile, contrast that with the fact that it takes about three seconds to load a 2k post topic, which takes half a second in Discourse. And the lack of good picture loading and infinite scroll is still a point.
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
but I'd imagine that it couldn't be so hard the WTDWTF folks couldn't do it
I think we had about a 15% success rate on trying to get a dev environment for Discourse working, and even then I don't think anyone managed to grok the code well enough to make more than the most basic clientside fixes.
Yes, it's that bad.
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@onyx said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
but I'd imagine that it couldn't be so hard the WTDWTF folks couldn't do it
I think we had about a 15% success rate on trying to get a dev environment for Discourse working, and even then I don't think anyone managed to grok the code well enough to make more than the most basic clientside fixes.
Yes, it's that bad.
Maybe it's changed. All I know is that Sponge does it.
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@julianlam I miss the little "reply" that pops up when I highlight text. It's a controversial miss, but when multi-quoting from a long, image-heavy post, it comes in handy to not have to find the bottom of the post every time.
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I don't actually know what multiple docker containers requires
like, no big deal at all. You just run multiple containers. Ideally with a
docker-compose
file so they all start and are connected to eahc other correctly, but IIRC the Discourse team didn't bother distributing one.@onyx said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I think we had about a 15% success rate on trying to get a dev environment for Discourse working
I didn't know much about docker back then, but I couldn't get what I wanted working.
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@izzion said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
the chat interface on mobile is very hard to work with.
I think that @ben_lubar broke this. There's some CSS in there that messes up the size.
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Infinite scroll is also painful, because it doesn't load posts until you're right on top of them, and then immediately scroll up or down some amount
Early on we lobbied for a change in the way images were loaded so that the viewport didn't jank around (AKA jellypotato). The problem was with images on the page above where you were looking. NodeBB however also doesn't load images below what you're looking at. This has the advantage of saving bandwidth for mobile users at the expense of fixing the original problem, plus the posts aren't ready to be viewed when you get there.
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@boomzilla said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Early on we lobbied for a change in the way images were loaded so that the viewport didn't jank around (AKA jellypotato). The problem was with images on the page above where you were looking. NodeBB however also doesn't load images below what you're looking at. This has the advantage of saving bandwidth for mobile users at the expense of fixing the original problem, plus the posts aren't ready to be viewed when you get there.
There's still the problem that even with pagination, and even with delay image loading turned off, if I hit a notification for the inspiration thread I'm guaranteed to be taken anywhere other than the actual target of the notification or my last read post. There's something genuinely screwed up there.
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I'd imagine Sponge's is so fast because they host their own. I don't actually know what multiple docker containers requires, but I'd imagine that it couldn't be so hard the WTDWTF folks couldn't do it
If you deviate even minutely from the One True Way to run Discourse you will not get any support from the Discodevs. At least, that's how it was in our day.
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
Meanwhile, contrast that with the fact that it takes about three seconds to load a 2k post topic, which takes half a second in Discourse. And the lack of good picture loading and infinite scroll is still a point.
This is a very recent innovation in Discourse. Also, it would commonly get into a state where it would do nothing because some ruby unicorn and rainbow thing was going bonkers.
But there were some real design head scratchers. For instance, in order to display 20 or 50 or 100 (or whatever) posts when you go to a thread it would always send every single post id in the entire thread. So not only are you sending all that over the wire but you're doing a ton of unnecessary DB I/O. There were some cases of a missing index but a lot of the stuff they did was just abuse. Like tracking the amount of time each post was visible. Which obviously requires your browser to be telling the server about that all the damn time and then requires the server to faithfully record that into the DB.
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@yamikuronue said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
I miss the little "reply" that pops up when I highlight text. It's a controversial miss, but when multi-quoting from a long, image-heavy post, it comes in handy to not have to find the bottom of the post every time.
YES! I can't count the number of times I've accidentally clicked the Submit button instead of the reply button when scrolled up in a post.
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@boomzilla said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
YES! I can't count the number of times I've accidentally clicked the Submit button instead of the reply button when scrolled up in a post.
Node does have the ability if you selected text in a post and hit Quote to only quote that text, which is almost as good. But it doesn't work on all platforms. Off the top oh my head I think Edge and Chrome do, IE and Safari do not.
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@heterodox said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@boomzilla said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
YES! I can't count the number of times I've accidentally clicked the Submit button instead of the reply button when scrolled up in a post.
Node does have the ability if you selected text in a post and hit Quote to only quote that text, which is almost as good. But it doesn't work on all platforms. Off the top oh my head I think Edge and Chrome do, IE and Safari do not.
The problem is that both the reply and quote buttons are not visible because I've scrolled up to select text from a long post. But the submit button is in approximately the right spot and it's blue and I end up clicking it accidentally, instead of scrolling back down to get to the correct buttons after I've selected some text.
If the popup happened, then I'd have a button that does what I'd want right there.
A related problem is that the "Fork" menu option is only available at the top or bottom of a thread, so it's difficult to fork a thread from something in the middle.
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@boomzilla
Another "is this our customization or is this a core" problem...My work PC is constantly logged out when I get in at the start of the week, whereas my home PC (which I access from regularly including weekends) doesn't suffer from that. So it seem that the "keep me logged in" cookie has a fairly short expiration, which bugs me to no end.
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@izzion I'm not aware of any session / login customizations here.
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@izzion said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
My work PC is constantly logged out when I get in at the start of the week, whereas my home PC (which I access from regularly including weekends) doesn't suffer from that. So it seem that the "keep me logged in" cookie has a fairly short expiration, which bugs me to no end.
The relevant cookie (express.sid) is issued with a two week expiration on this site. Sounds like something specific IT did to your PC, not a NodeBB/wtd problem.
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
How was closing your threads on your own platform? I'm confused. Or do you mean meta.d?
He had an administrative role, ostensibly to only help with any backend issues we might have had.
Instead, without knowing much of the audience around here, he decided he'd try his hand at moderation on here as well.
Things went downhill from there.
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@unperverted-vixen
I know we don't have any Chrome GPOs set up, and that I'm not doing anything to flush cookies, it just disappears over the weekend.
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@izzion Do you have Chrome set to clear cookies on exit?
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@raceprouk
I seriously doubt it, since I close and shut down nightly and don't have the problem on weekdays.... and also, I don't know where to check that setting, lol.
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@pjh said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@the_quiet_one said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
but I've noticed its activity has gone down in the last few years. This will no doubt kill it for good.
Actually we got an uptick in participation when we moved over to Discourse...
Community Server being shit doesn't excuse Discourse turning out to be only slightly less shitty.
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Thanks for the feedback guys.
I spent days figuring out jelly potato, which is still an issue, even though it works 90% of the time (which I'll admit, that remaining 10% is annoying). I think Chrome ended up pushing some code into their latest versions that handles the jankiness for you, although I don't know whether other browsers have done the same. It seems kind of exclusionary to remove the jellypotato code if Chrome does it automatically, leaving other browsers in the dark, even if Chrome is the one true browser
That said I'm re-evaluating whether I should merge @boomzilla's PR for loading images below the fold... to be honest it might be okay especially since we support resizing of images now.
@pie_flavor excuse my unfamiliarity with this community -- can you link me to the topic that takes 4-5 seconds to load for you? I wonder if it is simply an issue with the user being far from the server... not that I'm saying it's your problem, just wondering is all.
Hey, I could always disable jellypotato code
if (browser === 'chrome')
... I remember someone here mentioned that jellypotato happened on Chrome Canary but I didn't fix it because I tend not to fix issues that crop up on development versions of browsers. Might be worth looking into now.
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@julianlam @pie_flavor Oh hey wow nodeBB devs listen instead of saying "You're TR banned"
I mean, we had @sam who was reasonable, but either he got wore out from trying to keep things civil (WOW UNCIVILIZED BEHAVIOR FROM THE DEVS OF SOFTWARE MEANT TO BRING CIVILIZED DISCOURSE WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT) or was told to stop interacting with us because they were dropping us.
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@eviltrout lives in Toronto too, actually. We met up with him once. Nice guy.
However, there is a non-zero chance he was being nice because we outnumbered him 3 to 1.
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@julianlam said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@eviltrout lives in Toronto too
Fuckin Canadians !
Oh wait....
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@julianlam I know you're busy, but while you're looking at feedback, could you do some issue triage? Not asking for action, just it's kinda depressing to see a bunch of tags and commentary and commits on issues before and since but tumbleweeds rolling through one's own issues.
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@julianlam said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor excuse my unfamiliarity with this community -- can you link me to the topic that takes 4-5 seconds to load for you? I wonder if it is simply an issue with the user being far from the server... not that I'm saying it's your problem, just wondering is all.
Other reasons for topics taking insanely long amounts of time on this site may include one of the 8 server processes getting pounded by Bing/Yandex/Baidu and the user being unlucky enough for nginx to put them on the same process, a topic with iframely stuff that takes forever to load that isn't cached, and (as we found in one case recently) an absurd number of frog emoji.
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@pjh said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
How was closing your threads on your own platform? I'm confused. Or do you mean meta.d?
He had an administrative role, ostensibly to only help with any backend issues we might have had.
Instead, without knowing much of the audience around here, he decided he'd try his hand at moderation on here as well.
Things went downhill from there.
The existing mods must have been .
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@julianlam said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
However, there is a non-zero chance he was being nice because we outnumbered him 3 to 1.
Well, you're all Canadians, so what else would you expect?
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@julianlam said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@pie_flavor excuse my unfamiliarity with this community -- can you link me to the topic that takes 4-5 seconds to load for you? I wonder if it is simply an issue with the user being far from the server... not that I'm saying it's your problem, just wondering is all.
I'm on mobile right now so they're all janky for me. Back on my computer, though, I just scrolled down looking for topics. Even some 500-ers took a few seconds to load.
Oh, and Discourse on mobile lets you have both the thread and the reply box simultaneously open; all you have to do is retract the keyboard. If NodeBB can do that, then I'm not seeing it.
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Technically, you can, we just hid the button (the arrow at the top left of the composer) on mobile since it's more of a power-user feature. It can be re-added by @ben_lubar if he so wishes
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@pie_flavor said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
The existing mods must have been .
(One of?*) the existing, active, native, admin threatened to resign over his meddling, unless he stopped doing it.
We didn't, as I recall actually have any mods at the time, we simply didn't need them.
* I think @dhromed was around then as well.
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@twelvebaud said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
@julianlam I know you're busy, but while you're looking at feedback, could you do some issue triage? Not asking for action, just it's kinda depressing to see a bunch of tags and commentary and commits on issues before and since but tumbleweeds rolling through one's own issues.
The one-stop shop we immediately reacted to and thought it was a great idea. Cheers and pats on the back all around.
Unfortunately that was in our internal slack and nobody commented on the issue, let me do that now.
@PJH's issue I've just resolved.
The third's write-up is really complicated, so I am going to read it over a couple more times since my brain isn't grokking the repro steps at the moment.
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@julianlam said in FlightAware starts using Sadness ensues:
The third's write-up is really complicated,
Here's the simple version, since I assume you're kind of familiar with our long-runners:
- I ignore the General category, since there's enough churn there it'd clog my unread list.
- I want to un-ignore The Official Status Thread, since it's something I'm interested in.
- I don't want to get notifications for every reply to The Official Status Thread, just have it start using the Unread tab.
- I can't, since "Not Watching" is the same as "Ignoring" if the category is ignored.