Streak achievement bugs and usability problems

[Alys]

As reported by thebat137 (dea8a9e8-c084-438a-9a14-7fe96a73fd0a):

"I've been getting apparently duplicate streak achievement messages lately. As I've noted before, there are certain tasks I often do together, so I will tend to check all those tasks off in a row, at which point I'll get a bunch of streak notifications in sequence.
But the strange thing I've been seeing lately is that I get several streak notifications in a row that all have the same streak count (e.g., today I just got three copies of the "791 streaks" notification).
I am always very careful these days to wait for the synchronization indicator (the progress bar at the top of the screen) to clear in between clicks, so I don't think it's literally the same action registering multiple times.
However, I did notice that, when I clicked on one of the duplicate streak notifications, all of them would clear at once.
Moreover, if I get another streak after clearing those notifications, the streak count on the new notification increments correctly (it was 792 today)."

I haven't been able to reproduce exactly that (this is not to say that the behaviour described by thebat137 doesn't occur). In a few tests today I did see duplicate notifications three or four times. For example:

I did not get them all clearing at once - I had to click on each individually.

Both thebat137 and I have preferences.suppressModals.streak set to false (i.e., at Settings > Site the "Don't show popup when attaining a Streak achievement" is not ticked. This means that when we click the streak notification, the streak achievement modal opens (this is expected and desired behaviour).
However when you have a few streak notifications queued up at the same time and you click on them one after the other, the modal always displays the same number - the most recent number of streak achievements. This is expected from a technical perspective since the modal is reading the number of streak achievements from the user's account, which is the highest number displayed in the notifications, but it appears buggy from a user point of view. If you didn't know how the modal was being created, you'd expect each modal to show you the same number that you see in the streak notification.

In addition, as thebat137 has reported previously, the way that the streak modal works now isn't ideal from a usability perspective. She correctly reported this in Trello as a feature request but I'm copying her post here because it's related:

The other day I achieved a number of streaks in a row (not unusual, since certain tasks tend to all get done together). I think it is great that the streak achievements now have notifications that stay visible until acknowledged with a click, and that clicking on the notification to dismiss it is now what creates the streak achievement popup.

However, this has created a new accessibility-ish problem, which is that if I get ten streak achievements in a row, I have to click on each one's notification individually to dismiss it, and each of the ten notifications individually produces the popup. So now I have to: move my cursor to the right of the screen, click the notification to dismiss it, move my cursor to the center of the screen, click the popup to dismiss it, and move my cursor back to the right of the screen again to dismiss the next popup, for ten popups in a row. For me this is slightly annoying and somewhat user-hostile, but accessibility-wise it seems worse than that.

I know that I can turn the streak achievement popups off with a checkbox in my settings, but I like seeing the popup message once, I just don't like having to click back and forth ten times in a row for ten achievements. Instead, it would be nice if, when multiple streak achievement notifications are present, clicking on one of them produces a popup summarizing all the listed streak achievements, and dismissing that popup dismisses all of the streak achievement notifications at once, rather than having to do them individually.

The current suggested workaround is to refresh the page to dismiss all the notifications at once, which I can live with for now, but it seems like it might be good to have this polished up a bit in the long run.

I'm marking this as suggestion-discussion for now in case it's considered best to fix both the bugs above and the usability problems by redesigning how the streak achievement notification and modals work. However if there's no better ideas for how to present them, this can be changed to help wanted for just the bug fixes.

[thebat137]

An update on this bug: I just got a doubled streak achievement message right now (812 streaks), and I had to click each notification individually to make them go away. So it's possible I was misremembering what happened last time. (Or it could manifest differently under different circumstances, I suppose.)

One point which may be relevant: it happened right after my first check-in for the day, and before I'd checked off any tasks for the day. So i assume it was triggered by the tasks I checked off in the "record yesterday's activity" modal. I think this may have also been true the other times I've noticed it. I suspect the sequence of the notification generation with other aspects of cron might make this problem more likely to occur than at other times.

[veeeeeee]

Deferred until we are able to work on notifications (hopefully within a year).