messages & notifications computer bugs - red dot appears even though no new messages or notification

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m said: messages & notifications computer bugs - red dot appears whenever i log in even though no new messages or notifications.

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Tom Huber said: That is some weird action. I'm running Chrome on a Windows 7 computer, but the red dot does disappear if I read the message(s). I've run into one case where a dot appeared on the "bell" (next to Messages). Clicking on it displayed discovery messages.

Funny action, though. When I clicked on the bell, the system displayed a list of discovered messages and cleared the dot (the Get Sat site and this forum). When I opened FamilySearch, the dots for both messages and the bell were there. Clicking on the bell caused the dot to disappear. Clicking on Messages caused the dot to disappear, yet there was at least one new user-to-user message to be read.

(shaking head)

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Tom Huber said: This gets worse. I used to be able to click on the message icon and it would open the message window. Now it doesn't open the message window, but gives me a list. I don't know any way to reach the message window. Right-clicking and opening in a new window is not available.

There are some modifications that are being made, but they are not working -- possibly indicating that I'm now in the middle of some kind of roll-out.

Help!

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Tom Huber said: On this Get Sat site, clicking on the message icon does nothing, not even produce a list of recent messages.

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m said: The things you are describing don't sound good!

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gasmodels said: Tom, If you click on the message icon and get a list of messages, then click on the top message and it will open that thread and all the other threads are in a column on the LHS of the screen. I think this is exactly the screen that used to open in the older display. Took me awhile to figure this out.

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m said: I think the message computer bug might be that when I send a message it gives me a red dot and then I open the messages...only to find the message I sent to someone else.

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m said: Red dot notification checked and it was the same notification from two days ago:

"Record Hint
18 June 2020 - We may have found a new record..."

Message red dot checked and it was the same message from 19 Jun.

Oh and I noticed on the Discovery page after I checked the red dot and there was nothing new, the same 2 red dots appeared on Notifications and Messages, so I checked both again...same old messages.

Red dots just keep appearing over and over and over.

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Jeff Wiseman said: So it would appear that the FS website has the measles!

I'm seeing inconsistent operation in those areas as well. But it is encouraging to see that the tree collaborative messages and the FS advertising announcements have all been separated into different areas!

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Gordon Collett said: To reach the screen that shows all the messages, in addition to clicking on the top one as gasmodels said, you can also just go down to the bottom of the list and click "Show All Messages."



Also, right clicking on that "Show All Messages" link lets you open the message screen in a new tab or window. Actually, at lease in Safari, right clicking on any of the listed messages opens the page in a new tab or window.

I'm not sure the red dot thing is a bug. I might be wrong, but I've had the impression that the shift from the old top banner to the new top banner has just lost track of what message have been read and which have not. As they shift things back and forth working on the update, this might just be a little unstable for now. Once the update is done, I suspect that the after the first time of opening Messages or Notifications that that flag will stick and the red dot will stay gone until a new item arrives.

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Paul said: There must be a bug. I haven't sent / received any messages for a couple of days but the red dot suddenly appeared after I'd been logged in for few couple of hours today. Disappeared when I clicked on Show All Messages.

If not a bug, maybe a regular "reminder" feature is being introduced to encourage regular checks for new messages - regardless of there not being anything new.

(Coincidentally, have received two "unread message" notifications on my mobile today - both for messages I'd just read. Never had that happen before, either!)

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Jeff Wiseman said: They've turned it into a 4 way flashing stop sign.

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Gordon Collett said: Doubt that will help people notice they have messages. Don't know about how 4-way flashing stop signs work in your town, but around here they still don't slow people down.

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Jeff Wiseman said: So are you saying that I have selected an excellent analogy?
:-)

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Paul said: Sorry, you don't have to do anything but click on the red dot to make it disappear - or should we check in case there really is a message there? This needs an urgent fix.

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Gordon Collett said: OK, time to really test this. I'm signed into Firefox as myself and into Safari as my wife. No red dots anywhere.



I send her a message and now see:



No flashing, no animation. If I click on the icon, the red dot disappears, the list of messages appears, and new messages are in enough of a bold typeface to stand out clearly from old ones:



If I click off the list, it closes and the red dot is gone. Clicking on the list, the new message is still in bold. I wonder if I just leave this for a while? Will the red dot come back? What if she signs off and signs back on? I'll try that. Nope, dot did not come back. I'll sign her out and wait a few hours then see what happens.

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Gordon Collett said: So it's been a few hours, have signed in and out a few times and still no red dot appearing on the person page.

However, I just went into the Source Box and red dot is showing.

If I go to the All Activities page it shows up.

And on Ordinances Ready.

If I go to my reserved ordinances or my shared ordinances, a red dot appears on the notifications icon that has not popped up anywhere else yet.

Let take a step back and look at each menu to see if the dot is present:

Family Tree - Tree - Yes
Family Tree - Person - No
Family Tree - Find - Yes
Family Tree - Lists - Yes

Search - Records - No
Search - Images - No
Search - Family Tree - Yes
Search - Genealogies - Yes
Search - Catalog - Yes
Search - Books - No
Search - Research Wiki - No

Memories - Overview - No
Memories - Gallery - No
Memories - People - No
Memories - Find - No

Indexing - Overview - No
Indexing - Web Indexing - No
Indexing - Find a Project -No
Indexing - Help Center - No

Activities - All Activities - Yes
Activities - Where am I from - No
Activities - All About Me - Yes
Activities - Compare a Face - Yes
Activities - Record My Stories - Yes
Activities - Picture My Heritage - Yes
Activities - In-Home Activities - Yes, and with a larger dot

Temple - My Reservations - No (but does have a Notifications Dot)
Temple - Shared - No (but does have a Notifications Dot)
Temple - Ordinances Ready - Yes

So that explains the blinking four way stop effect. The top most banners of each of these sections are not talking to each other.

Next test: If I clear the dot on Activities - All Activities, which other ones will vanish? The red dots on all the Activities subsection cleared except for the one on In-Home Activities. It also cleared all the dots under Family Tree and the one or Ordinances Ready.

The dot on Search-Genealogies is very unstable. Sometimes it is there, sometimes not. In fact the entire top banner under Search - Genealogies is unstable in that sometimes the banner looks like this:



and sometimes like this:



If I just click on Genealogies repeatedly, without doing anything else, it will randomly switch between the two. I am not changing the width of my screen.

I can get Catalog to do the same thing. Clicking on it repeated will, at random, make it switch to the banner which has a red dot on the message icon but does not have the notification icon at all and the banner which does not have a red dot but does have the notification icon

There are definitely some weird bugs here and some very unstable behavior. I don't think we're looking at a quick fix. It's going to take them forever just to figure out why this is happening.

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joe martel said: This is a good discussion and the teams are aware of this issue. But it's a subtle expectation. Social apps like Facebook and instagram (feed-like) reset the reset as soon as you click it. It doesn't care if you attended to each item that is new. More messaging-like apps like gmail, text messages, or slack use the red to basically mean you have a thread to attend to and clear the red only when you have dove in each thread to read. 

So the question is when should red show? Does it behave differently for Messages, versus Notifications. To me Notifications feel feed-like, whereas Message must work like messaging app. So does red dot mean different things? Or should it be the same (Click the icon and Red is gone)?

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Paul said: Surely it should just behave as it did previously - i.e. red dot meant new message to read. True, it sometimes took a while (reloads, etc.) to make it go away, but it only ever appeared in the first place if there was something new to be read.

The current situation will lead us to think there is almost certainly no new activity and just click on the dot to make disappear. So what's the point of the red dot at all, at present, except to act as a regular reminder to check for new messages - whether there will be any, or not?

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Paul said: Checked this again just now (when red dot appeared) and wonder if we're making too much fuss. The previous messages (and timings) can be clearly seen without going to Messages itself, so it should be clear if there is something new to read.

However, it would be good to have a clear confirmation if this is how the red dot will "work" in future - i.e if this behaviour is by design rather than a bug.

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Gordon Collett said: I would expect two things for the Messages and Notifications icons.

1) Consistency - both in when they are present and what they mean. They should not come and go based on which page I am on in FamilySeach and whether showing on Messages or Notifications they should mean the same thing.

Here is what I see this morning:





Switching between Tree and Person should not make the dots come and go.

2) Simple Meaning - I would like them to function like similar dots found in similar situations:



Clicking on the icon itself should not change the dot at all. Only after addressing each item should the dot vanish.

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Jeff Wiseman said: Each message received in my account "messages" is critical to my discussions with different people regarding different records I'm looking at. The granularity of notifications MUST be on a message by message basis. You can't compare it to Facebook where you can receive any number of unsolicited and irrelevant messages. Please don't use Facebook as a "standard" for these specific genealogical applications.

Perhaps the "red dot" should always look like the last example given in Gordon's image above and include the total of unaddressed (unread) messages that exist. In other words, the dot should NOT be flagging NEW messages, it should be flagging that there are still UNREAD messages (and ideally, the total number of unread messages).

Now treating the FS one-way advertising oriented announcements in the same way would have the value of consistency and less confusion. However, their behavior is no where near as critical as the individual handling of messages use for actually researching and doing collaboration of record comparisons with others.

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Jeff Wiseman said: Regarding the schizophrenic behavior of the red dots appearing and going away, then reappearing, etc. The scope of this control should cross my entire account. If I have 15 messages appear and I read 4 of them, it should then show 11 unread messages.

But it should show this same information regardless of where I view it from. If I later log into my SAME ACCOUNT from a different browser on a different device, it should STILL show 11 unread messages. This is because there is only as single collection of these messages at any given time.

For example, when using SMTP email messages, accessing them via a client to a POP server means that you are downloading copies of your messages to your local device. When you do this, the “unread messages” count is based on the messages in your DEVICE and not necessarily the ones in your ACCOUNT on the server. So depending on how you access those emails and from which device you access them, the unread email counts WILL BE DIFFERENT. The messages facility at FS does not have any of these visible message caching features. There is one collection of messages everywhere across a person’s account, and therefore the unread messages statues should be identical regardless of where those messages are viewed from.

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m said: The last red dot I had I clicked on it and it was an old message.

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m said: Red dot just alerted me to a Message dated 27 Jun 2020 that I sent to someone else.

Red dot just alerted me to a Discovery dated 18 Jun.

27 Jun was last week; 18 Jun was 2 weeks ago---I don't think red dots are working like they are supposed to work.