Avoiding multiple (annoying) alerts for non-core alert types

[Shade-]

As discussed here, if you're using an extra pack of alerts or whatever plugin that supports MyAlerts, users can receive more than one notification for the same event. If you are a) mentioned, b) quoted in a c) reply of a thread you've made and d) you've subscribed to, MyAlerts will send you 4 alerts with the same purpose, assuming you've installed MentionMe + Plugins Alerts Pack.

This came up to my mind just now after months. I was looking for something to improve my MyAlerts extensions and got the solution scratching my head a little bit. It's quite easy but really effective as we can make a great use of PHP sessions to store subsequent calls and data to check whether if an alert has been already delivered for that specific thread or not and act dependently on it.

        if(!session_id()) {
            session_start();
        }

        if(!empty($tid)) {
            if($tid == $_SESSION['tid'] && $type != $_SESSION['type']) {
                return;
            } else {
                unset($_SESSION['tid']);
                unset($_SESSION['type']);
                $_SESSION['tid'] = $tid;
                $_SESSION['type'] = $type;
            }
        }

It's just easy as this snippet. We check for both the tid and the type of alert because if you reply to a thread, the user sees the alert and you reply once again to the same thread, the tid will be the same and the alert won't be generated (we want at least one to be delivered 😄).

This seems the best solution with a transparent approach to me. No wasted queries and just a small change to make the MyAlerts experience much smarter for both developers and users.

[euantorano]

Looks like a good idea. I'll test it and see if it helps for me too. Removing extra queries is always welcome :) Thanks Shade.

[nntoan]

And where we can put these codes ? Alert.class.php ?

[Shade-]

Yes, as you can see in the commit

[WildcardSearch]

Looking good guys. Can't wait to test.

Nice work as always @Shade-