The hit-and-miss of RD alerts

Mascot · Mar 5, 2020

It's always been this way here at RD but I was hoping for improvements with the new site. Nope. Same old, same old.
The issue is that I don't receive notifications (the little bell icon, top right) when there are new posts in threads that I'm following.
Or rather, they happen for a short time, then stop for no reason. I think a subscribed thread is dormant, manually check and find dozens of new posts.
Anyone else experiencing this?
What gives? Surely this is a digital function and should work 100% of the time, but it seems to be analogue with random fuzzy logic applied.

Benutzername · Mar 5, 2020

Never had problems with alerts. They stop working if you havent seen the latest post, though. Meaning, if you ignore an alert you wont be notified again until youve seen the latest post.

Otherwise yould get tons of alerts if many people reply to a thread.

Mascot · Mar 5, 2020

Benutzername said:
Never had problems with alerts. They stop working if you havent seen the latest post, though. Meaning, if you ignore an alert you wont be notified again until youve seen the latest post.

Otherwise yould get tons of alerts if many people reply to a thread.

I understand that if several people reply to a watched thread when I'm asleep I'll only get one alert for that thread - the problem is I often don't get any alerts at all.

Neilski · Mar 5, 2020

This sometimes seems to happen to me as well (and I've heard other reports). Not sure what causes it but it's possible that leaving a window open on a thread might affect notifications for that thread. Something else that has certainly caught me out is simply failing to click on one of the alerts (easily enough done when you have 20+).

One partial workaround is to check the "watched thread" list every day after checking your actual alerts, to see if anything has snuck through - at https://www.racedepartment.com/watched/threads, or from the menu in the pic below.

If you do review your alerts after discovering a thread with activity that you had missed, prove to yourself that the alert really didn't happen, and the time delay isn't too big (48 hours, say) then you could try dropping me a line so I can review the system to see if I can get a clue as to the cause. However, it's a difficult process and I don't have high confidence of success...