Messages counters display incorrect number of messages; alerts not consistently dismissed

[jwzimmer-zz]

TL;DR: There are a couple things going on here contributing to the effect of the counters being unreliable & the alert dismissal being unreliable: (1) Dismissing an alert doesn't always permanently dismiss it; (2) The Messages value should never be less than 0, but somehow it currently can be; (3) The counter in the navbar is wrong if either counter from the body of the Messages page is wrong.

Chrome 60, Mac OS El Capitan, Staging

Dismissing an alert always reduces the value of the "Messages from the Scratch Team" counter while you are on the Messages page, but once you navigate away and back again, the counter may not stay decremented.

Repro
If you click an X to dismiss an alert, then go to the Explore page, then go back to the Messages page, the alert you just dismissed will have come back.

The "Messages" counter on the body of the Messages page should never have a value less than 0, but currently it's displaying a value of -2. (I'm not sure exactly what causes this.)

The navbar message counter seems to be set based on the "Messages" counter + "Messages from the Scratch Team" counter, so if one of those values is incorrect, the value in the navbar message counter is also incorrect.

[mewtaylor]

@jwzimmer this is due to the behavior of navigating away from the messages page, and immediately back to it within the span of 2 minutes – these api endpoints are all cached for 2 minutes. If you were to come back after 2 minutes, it would display correctly. These messages are indeed dismissed, but the list of messages will not get updated until after the cache expires.

I don't think it's a good idea to purge these endpoints after a dismissal and optimize for immediate revisits, because this is a behavior that is more often seen in testing than in production. Consequently, I think we should not worry about the message re-appearing in this type of interaction.

I can look into the negative counter though, that seems like an actual bug.

[thisandagain]

/cc @rschamp

[mewtaylor]

tracking in https://github.com/LLK/scratch-api/pull/325

[mewtaylor]

Fixed in https://github.com/LLK/scratch-api/pull/325

[chrisgarrity]

The first time I went to the messages page the number was wrong (7 not 3):

But the next time it was correct:

By the way it is a student account.

[jwzimmer-zz]

Currently I am seeing this with the account abcdekfy on Staging (Safari, Mac OS El Capitan).

The navbar counter says 6 on both www and r2 pages; the Messages from Scratch Team counter says 7 (and there are 7 alerts) and the Messages counter does not say anything (0).

@mewtaylor looked at this account and fixed this issue in https://github.com/LLK/scratchr2/commit/e3da4b1a589271a05a723a093555b8e4c3b2a9de. However, this is not a repro of the issue @chrisgarrity observed in #1497 (comment).

[mewtaylor]

@jwzimmer that most recent version of this issue should be solved in https://github.com/LLK/scratchr2/commit/e3da4b1a589271a05a723a093555b8e4c3b2a9de. As for the student account issue that was being seen by @chrisgarrity, I still have not repro'd yet

[jwzimmer-zz]

The invite to become a Scratcher doesn't seem to be incrementing the messages counter in the navbar:

[jwzimmer-zz]

Scratchr2 navbar said 0, but scratch-www navbar says 2 (for arglebargle):

Update

This difference went away when I cleared the cache. : )

[jwzimmer-zz]

Sort-of-repro

I saw 5 notifications marked as unread and 5 in the navbar counter, but the last notification was from 20 hours ago and had definitely been read multiple times today.
@mewtaylor explained that:

the way that works is that something appearing as “unread” is not a demarcation on the notification itself – there’s a count that’s cached, and it just shows the first n messages as “unread” depending on the count
so, it’s not that that message is “unread” – it’s that the count seems to have gotten off somehow

After investigation it turned out that the issue was what happened when a project was added to the studio.
@mewtaylor said:

I think I see the issue. I had a place where I increment the cache count that I forgot to remove yesterday when I was making changes
so it incremented the cache count without there being something to display
because I originally thought adding a project to a studio resulted in a notification

But all the studio activities are consolidated into one notification per day.

@mewtaylor is fixing this issue now! : )

The plot thickens

I replied to a thread I follow, and expected to see that notification, but instead saw the same old message re-marked as read - like the counter is increasing correctly, but the most recent notification isn't showing up?

@mewtaylor said:

With the change I made yesterday that excluded showing activity where you’re both the actor and recipient, I think I just forgot to make an update for posting in a forum you follow. I’ll make that update now, and check if there are any other cases like that that could come up.

[jwzimmer-zz]

Should be fixed by @mewtaylor's latest changes.