Updates - New Notification Settings, New Sponsor Ranks

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We updated the site yesterday! Full details follow.

Updates for Revision Beta 61

* Added: New sponsor ranks! There are now Emerald, Ruby and Diamond ranks above the previous top level of Gold. We added these after requests from people interested in donating larger amounts. It's also a nice way to reward people who donate several amounts over a period of time that would previously only have qualified them for Gold status.

* Added: Past Sponsors are now recognised with a leaf icon, rather than losing their sponsor badge altogether after it expires. This icon will only show if the account still has "show sponsor icon" turned on in account settings.

* Changed: Members who donated enough to get Silver sponsor status now get Bronze status for an additional 3 months after their Silver expires.

* Fixed: When typing names on the New Private Message screen, it is now no longer case sensitive. Previously if you typed a name that didn't match the exact case of the username as recorded in the system, it would think the name was invalid.

* Added: Notifications settings are now available on the Account Settings page. You can control whether the system shows the yellow marker number overlayed on the notices counts when new items come in since you last looked at the new notices page. You can also control whether the system flashes new items yellow when you first view them on the New Submissions, Notices or Private Messages pages.

* Changed: The number in the yellow subnotices marker is now bold font, which should make it easier to read on smaller screens or when the marker is over dark parts of the site background.

* Fixed: The New Notices page will now show Older Notices correctly when you click the "Show Older" bar. Previously it would randomly bug out and show nothing (usually if you were viewing only a certain notice type and not all types).

* Changed: The system used to detect new notices and notify you in the menu bar has been improved (again!) so it is now more accurate and stable. Previously it was showing the yellow subnotice numbers simply by watching for a change in the overall notice count. This was too simplistic as you might have someone post a journal and someone else delete one before the next time you view the site, which would mean your notices count would stay the same. But really you'd have 1 new notice to see. It now allows for that kind of scenario and will display the right number of new notices accordingly. (This also applies to New Submissions and Private Messages notifications).

* Changed: The New Notices page used to poll the server every minute to detect new notices, and the site menu bar would do its own polling every 2 minutes to check for site maintenance messages. This was pointless duplication. Now the menu bar is solely responsible for polling every two minutes for all notice info, and it tells the Notices page (if you have it open) to go get new notices and display them only if any new ones have come in. A neat trick using HTML5 Storage means that even if you have 100 tabs open, only one tab will contact the server every 2 minutes on behalf of all the rest and then share the data with them.

* Changed: New Private Messages will flash just once in Private Messages list view. They used to flash twice, which wasn't consistent with the other new notice pages.

* Added: Unread Support Ticket counts are now dynamically updated on the Notices page when new unread ticket notifications come in.

* Fixed: A bug with the yellow flashing of items on the Notices page was causing items to incorrectly show up after you removed them, or to stay stuck to the screen when you tried to filter by a certain type before the yellow flashing animation had completed.

* Optimised: A bunch of database and coding stuff has been added to make the new notifications system more efficient by minimising the number of queries needed to be run every time your browser polls the server for new notices.

* Added: Moderators can now turn user's sponsor badge on/off on the donations record page. Previously we had to go to account settings to turn on a user's sponsor badge before then recording the donation on a separate page, which was tedious!

* Changed: Site stats are now updated once every 15 minutes (was 5 minutes). The stats for Monthly and Weekly user activity take a while to calculate so it makes sense to cache the data for longer so people viewing that page hopefully don't have to wait for ages every time they go there.

* Fixed: The admin tool to remove all of a user's support tickets was broken. Now it works!

* Fixed: Username links in the site maintenance notice bar are now force to always show white. Previously they would show orange if it was a username of someone you watch (usually the inkbunny account). But this color is hard to read in the dark grey bar. Because the notices text is computed and cached systemwide from the first account that views the site notice, it would highlight names based on the first account that viewed it and then show that highlighting status to everyone else, which was silly!

* Optimised: Made use of the Scriptaculous javascript library in more places where we were previously using our own hand-hacked effects (such as fade in/out of items).

* Optimised: Got rid of a bunch of junk obsolete code to do with "Notifications autoremove" from the Javascript and also the backend. This feature was trialed and abandoned years ago.

Thanks

IB