gui: Mark devices that haven't connected for a long time (fixes #7703)

[tomasz1986]

Currently, a disconnected device is marked as "Disconnected" without any
consideration whether the state is just temporary or rather it has been
like that for a long time, potentially requiring user intervention.

This commit adds a new state called "Disconnected (Inactive)" which is
shown for devices that have been disconnected for longer than a week. It
also changes the "Last seen" information, so that "Never" is used only
when the device hasn't connected at all, and the exact date is displayed
otherwise.

Additionally, when the date is older than 1 week, a note about that is
displayed below the date. Furthermore, when the date becomes older than
1 month, the note text colour changes to orange, and when it exceeds 1
year, the colour changes again to red. This is done to provide the user
with a visual clue that something may potentially be wrong and requires
a manual fix.

Signed-off-by: Tomasz Wilczyński twilczynski@naver.com

Screenshots

Before

After (ignore the date)

[calmh]

Looks reasonable to me! (Giving others a chance to weigh in, if nobody does feel free to merge.)

[tomasz1986]

One thing that I am worried about is that "stale" may be tricky to translate.

[calmh]

Indeed. In Swedish it essentially becomes either just "old" (no real value judgement) or something akin to "mouldy"...

[tomasz1986]

I usually like to check for technical terms in https://microsoft.com/language, which is obviously a little biased and limited to Windows and other Microsoft products, but the translations there are generally done by professional translators and are hence good quality. In case of "stale" though, the Polish translation is more like "outdated", "inactive", or "obsolete", which isn't exactly the same.

Although, to tell the truth, "inactive" doesn't sound bad, does it? Is it better than "stale"? Definitely easier to translate, that's for sure, but the meaning is quite not exactly the same…

On the other hand, the generic dictionary translation is similar to yours, and it's more about food (= not fresh) or something not interesting (= boring).

[acolomb]

Agree that stale is difficult to translate and not very accurate. How about something involving "gone", "long gone" or "missing"? The latter is a common military term (MIA, missing in action) in English, but probably just as hard to translate or grasp. But maybe an inspiration?

Dated?

Red-shifted? ;-)

Another thought: why not just put a time directly in those parens? "Disconnected (8 days ago)" where anything below one week is not shown.

[imsodin]

What about "Long disconnected" or "Disconnected for a long time" (latter seems too long, former might not really be English?). I wouldn't add more information to the "title bar" - I think that should stay as minimal as possible. On that note I also dislike the "more than a" line - to me that uses space for very little added value (the date already conveys the info). If you want the color thing, that could go on the date and that "more than" thing into a tooltip. However just a weak personal oppinion and suggestion, feel free to disregard. As in only engage the bikeshedding if you want, I am totally fine with merging as is.

[calmh]

Gone (long time no see)

[acolomb]

Good direction, @calmh ... I guess we don't need the term "Disconnected" at all when "Gone" already implies that.

[tomasz1986]

Thank you very much for all the ideas 😁! I will experiment and see what fits best here. I agree that the "Disconnected (something)" label should be rather short though, as very long strings are already problematic (e.g. they can overflow breaking the GUI, or they become truncated hiding useful information).

Another thought: why not just put a time directly in those parens? "Disconnected (8 days ago)" where anything below one week is not shown.

I like this suggestion quite a bit, but it may be impossible to properly translate as well, as in some languages (e.g. Polish) the noun form changes depending on the number 😕 (and here we would end up with a lot of different forms, i.e. "day(s)", "week(s)", "month(s)", "year(s)", etc.). Also, it could potentially be too long to display in full.

On that note I also dislike the "more than a" line - to me that uses space for very little added value (the date already conveys the info). If you want the color thing, that could go on the date and that "more than" thing into a tooltip.

I actually tested doing just that first, but the coloured date with nothing else looked kind of poor in terms of aesthetics 😞 (and of course, totally inaccessible on touch screens…). That's why I switched to the current format instead. Obviously, the note below the main part is based on the lines "Reduced by ignore patterns" and "Altered by ignore deletes" that are used similarly under folder local state.

[tomasz1986]

I've changed the name from "stale" to "inactive". I'm not 100% sure if it's the best option, but at least it seems similar enough in meaning, and it should be much easier to translate too. I did try the other alternatives out and browsed through various English synonym dictionaries looking for other examples, but I really think this should only be a single word (like the existing "unused"), so the number of possibilities is limited here.

I've also added an exception not to calculate the date when it equals the Unix epoch (i.e. 1970-01-01), and I've added yet another case of "Disconnected (Unused, Inactive)", which was missing previously. The screenshots show the current state.

[acolomb]

Haven't looked at the result in action, just commenting code. I think it's going in the right direction.

[acolomb]

This one I find a bit confusing. If we don't share anything with a device, does it matter whether the connection had been established short or long ago?

Suggested change

	<span ng-switch-when="unused-disconnected-inactive"><span class="hidden-xs" translate>Disconnected (Unused, Inactive)</span><span class="visible-xs" aria-label="{{'Disconnected (Unused, Inactive)' | translate}}"><i class="fas fa-fw fa-unlink"></i></span></span>
	<span ng-switch-when="unused-disconnected-inactive"><span class="hidden-xs" translate>Disconnected (Unused)</span><span class="visible-xs" aria-label="{{'Disconnected (Unused)' | translate}}"><i class="fas fa-fw fa-unlink"></i></span></span>

[tomasz1986]

Done.

[acolomb]

Your latest commit removed the whole case though, so nothing will be displayed for unused-disconnected-inactive. We should just display the same label as for unused-disconnected, since both are still true.

[tomasz1986]

Thanks for noticing! I've fixed this now by reverting to what the code looked in the first iteration of the PR. What do you think?

[acolomb]

I meant dropping the , Inactive part within parentheses. Just use the same label Disconnect (Unused) as stated above.

EDIT: Sorry I just noticed you changed the logic in the JS code. Might work, but I couldn't say for sure right now if it hurts any of the other cases.

[tomasz1986]

Done. I've reverted the JS change and re-added the HTML. There's a lot of duplicated code in that whole HTML block, which I think could be simplified quite a bit, but I'll leave this for a different PR.

[imsodin]

Just a little nit: I'd check for unused here and not add the -inactive suffix then. The two states are the exact same in the web UI and I agree with that semantically: I think unused is the stronger/more relevant state than inactive, and having both doesn't add much IMO.

[tomasz1986]

Done.

[imsodin]

I would prefer defining a unused variable before Line 1078 and using that in L1078 and here.

[tomasz1986]

Done.

[imsodin]

That might be correct JS, but scoping at least looks wrong - something like this I'd expect

            var unused =($scope.deviceFolders(deviceCfg).length === 0

            if (unused) {

[tomasz1986]

Done. Is there any difference in scope though? Variables declared with var are available inside the whole function anyway.

[imsodin]

That's what I meant: It likely is correct and doesn't matter, but looks wrong and definitely isn't elegant (to exagerate you never want to do if condition { conditionVariable = true } else { conditionVariable = false} when you can just do conditionVariable = condition.

[rubin55]

I just noticed this change after updating today. One of my hosts has been off for about a year. I suppose a lot of users will see this for the first time.

Question: what are the consequences of a host being unavailable for a longer time? Wouldn't it just catch up with a lot of sync traffic? Is there a risk of dataloss?

Also, check this:

In the above image, the warning is "just" "orange", even though the host is not available for a year minus 10 days; should it not be "red"?

[tomasz1986]

The purpose of the message is just to provide information. There are valid use cases for having devices not connected for a longer period of time. However, when there are many devices, it's also easy to miss a specific one that haven't been syncing even though it was supposed to, hence the new "inactive" state that is visible in the main part of the Web GUI.

There's no risk of "data loss" per se, but if the device was modifying files that were supposed to sync right away yet for some reason they haven't (and at the same time you kept modifying them on other devices), you may then end up with a lot of conflicts once it finally connects.

When it comes to the colour, it will change to red as soon as the time period reaches 365 days 😉.