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March 23rd, 2026- Notification Purge and Downtime
3 days ago
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Journal Start
Hey there, Fuzzies!
We hate to have to make a post like this but we’re sure some of you noticed some issues with your notifications this morning. Back on July 18th, 2019 we had announced we’d be autoclearing notifications. We didn’t end up clearing them as aggressively as mentioned in that journal, however with time it became apparent we needed to. So on May 4th, 2025 we announced that we were planning to start auto-clearing notifications that are older than 6 months. We’ve been working in the background to prepare for some upgrades and downtime to get this done, but we never intended for this to be pushed live before giving another announcement so everyone would have a heads up that it was going to start.
Our tech team was discussing this purge during their most recent meeting. It was decided that we’d announce the downtime in this journal, then purge the notifications during that scheduled downtime. Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication, the pruning process was mistakenly started much earlier at 2:00 AM ET this morning and ended at 9:00 AM ET when staff was alerted by our community.
Because of how large these tables are, we cannot estimate how many notifications have been removed, nor can we restore this data. We have, however, been able to determine the cutoff date of where notifications were cleared.
Any notification older than the below are no longer in the database (all times in ET):
Journal comments: September 24, 2025 9:11 AM
Submission comments: November 23, 2018 10:26 PM
Favorites: January 30, 2013 9:02 AM
Journals: September 24, 2009 4:37 AM
Shouts: September 24, 2025 9:08 AM
Submissions: August 9, 2018 11:57 AM
Watches: August 24, 2016 6:49 AM
To be clear, it is only the notifications that have been removed. All the actual comments, favorites, journals, shouts, submissions, and watches are still there.
We have discussed the miscommunication with our team to ensure something like this will not happen again. We apologize profusely for any inconvenience this may have caused. We never intend to push these things live without communication unless in emergency situations, and this was not one of those exceptions.
We have a planned maintenance window to upgrade our system hypervisors, apply much-needed security and stability patches, and continue the notification clearing process.
A reminder for why we need to clear old notifications from our database: The impact on our system is immense, and can cause site slowdowns, inefficient use of space, and query lockups. Currently, even after this accidental clearing, the notifications table still takes over a terabyte of space and has billions of rows populated. The notifications system was built with a smaller site in mind, and because of that we are now seeing the limits of scaling that system.
This downtime will take place on Friday, April 3rd, 2026 from 1:00pm to 7:00pm Eastern Time. This maintenance will involve taking several key pieces of infrastructure and moving them off the affected nodes we are planning to upgrade. The large window is to facilitate that process and ensure we have wiggle room in case any update process needs extra time to complete.
We as a team have said over the last year that we are working on our ability to communicate with you, the community. This is part of that desire to continue providing you with transparency at Fur Affinity—something we still fully believe needs to continue, even if it’s bad news or embarrassing for us.
Thank you again for your understanding as we work through our premature pruning of notifications.
Please keep comments on topic and reminder to be excellent to each other!
We hate to have to make a post like this but we’re sure some of you noticed some issues with your notifications this morning. Back on July 18th, 2019 we had announced we’d be autoclearing notifications. We didn’t end up clearing them as aggressively as mentioned in that journal, however with time it became apparent we needed to. So on May 4th, 2025 we announced that we were planning to start auto-clearing notifications that are older than 6 months. We’ve been working in the background to prepare for some upgrades and downtime to get this done, but we never intended for this to be pushed live before giving another announcement so everyone would have a heads up that it was going to start.
Our tech team was discussing this purge during their most recent meeting. It was decided that we’d announce the downtime in this journal, then purge the notifications during that scheduled downtime. Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication, the pruning process was mistakenly started much earlier at 2:00 AM ET this morning and ended at 9:00 AM ET when staff was alerted by our community.
Because of how large these tables are, we cannot estimate how many notifications have been removed, nor can we restore this data. We have, however, been able to determine the cutoff date of where notifications were cleared.
Any notification older than the below are no longer in the database (all times in ET):
Journal comments: September 24, 2025 9:11 AM
Submission comments: November 23, 2018 10:26 PM
Favorites: January 30, 2013 9:02 AM
Journals: September 24, 2009 4:37 AM
Shouts: September 24, 2025 9:08 AM
Submissions: August 9, 2018 11:57 AM
Watches: August 24, 2016 6:49 AM
To be clear, it is only the notifications that have been removed. All the actual comments, favorites, journals, shouts, submissions, and watches are still there.
We have discussed the miscommunication with our team to ensure something like this will not happen again. We apologize profusely for any inconvenience this may have caused. We never intend to push these things live without communication unless in emergency situations, and this was not one of those exceptions.
We have a planned maintenance window to upgrade our system hypervisors, apply much-needed security and stability patches, and continue the notification clearing process.
A reminder for why we need to clear old notifications from our database: The impact on our system is immense, and can cause site slowdowns, inefficient use of space, and query lockups. Currently, even after this accidental clearing, the notifications table still takes over a terabyte of space and has billions of rows populated. The notifications system was built with a smaller site in mind, and because of that we are now seeing the limits of scaling that system.
This downtime will take place on Friday, April 3rd, 2026 from 1:00pm to 7:00pm Eastern Time. This maintenance will involve taking several key pieces of infrastructure and moving them off the affected nodes we are planning to upgrade. The large window is to facilitate that process and ensure we have wiggle room in case any update process needs extra time to complete.
We as a team have said over the last year that we are working on our ability to communicate with you, the community. This is part of that desire to continue providing you with transparency at Fur Affinity—something we still fully believe needs to continue, even if it’s bad news or embarrassing for us.
Thank you again for your understanding as we work through our premature pruning of notifications.
Please keep comments on topic and reminder to be excellent to each other!
Number go up :>
I even made a custom browser script that shows me the number of new notifications.
Well, today I noticed that I have lost 205 comment notifications.
>:C
the highest i got before i nuked it was back in 2016 when i had2834995S2553C
703907J266F415Wnever have gotten back up to those numbers since i purge weekly to monthly to keep it up to date
"[...] i purge weekly to monthly to keep it up to date"
I'm a person who likes to keep my inboxes tidy, so screenshotting or saving it off-site in some manner makes it super easy to see that stuff again!
now i enjoy peace of mind until the hard drive dies physically 😅
so the page will need to be refreshed multiple times, too 👌
i do this every couple of months manually 🥰
too basic for official mention, but a little beyond average user patience to find out 😅
Consider the wc command in bash: All it does is take some text and count how many lines, words and characters it has. It is also very useful at times and often gets the output of other commands piped to it.
here is a link to the browser extension if youre willing to try it 🥰
for chrome | for firefox
Could it save the other notifications too? Faves and watches can be browsed later, but comments are hard to keep track of...
And maybe it's just me but I clear notifications right away no matter what, I hate having unread messages/notifications and I have no idea why it bothers me so much
Because like. Yeah right now it's obvious it takes up space. But for most things you need to actually think about it before you can actually think about it. If you don't have reason to think about how much storage space notifs might take up, then you won't think about it.
On a picture yes I want that there forever but not in my notifications
I did notice that my number of Watchers (or rather, notifications about them) dropped by 4 today, so I figured something had happened.
Turns out they put them in the bin/trash/deleted items for "safe keeping"... yeah, after 30 days my servers are set to send them to the big bit bucket in the sky.
<Insert Picard face-palm here>
Im actually having a incredible hard time comming up with how a simple table containing a user and post id would cause problems beyond storage. Im willing to accept that, but it shouldnt cause performance issues.
Furthermore why not cap the length? I actually liked seeing the total amount of submission notifications i've ever gotten. I think its really cool data to be able to see.
Now i don't even ses the stuff i commeted on anymore and old discussions. Like at least leave me idk the last 500 of my comment notifies?
For a simple analogy imagine that every time you see number-go-up you gain a pound. Then imagine trying to get anything done dragging around 2 billion pounds that only weigh you down.
After that the oldest gets deleted.
Most of it can be cached so the database doesn't have to search it up again. But notifications are those "must show fresh results every page change". With billions of records of user and post ID, that's a lot to go through. And thousands of users are visiting the site every second. It puts pressure on the database server to queue up every query and complete them all. it's why sometimes you experience those blips of slowness.
Notifications are meant to be a temporary data thing. You read through them then remove. Compared to other tables in the database that store data for submissions, comments, watches etc - which are meant to be permanent, they probably take more data but are less frequently queried.
Think of it like a traffic jam on a highway. Remove the jam, and traffic flows smoothly again.
There really is no benefit to keep all your notifications.
You can purge them all, or you can bulk select the most recent ones (then purge them). Inverting the first page might work, but I haven't tested it - that would only let you delete everything but the most recent 128 (or whatever page you're on) anyway. So you're stuck either deleting them all, or deleting the most recent ones.
I think I was at 250k before?
I'm just lazy.
... oh well, I never read them anyways even though it doesn't come in that often. I should really clear them out to be honest.
Whoever had the most needs a stamp or smth because it's honestly kinda impressive LMAO
Hmm this page has everyone's icons, but it's for the people you follow.
Having a mutual list might be nice with the time watched would be nice though.
But given I still use the old layout, I probably wont get those features xD
What does it do? Is it just a different way to see watchers?
I had long-since purged my backlog of notifications, so I only kept like nineteen on my watch notifications. Lost eight of them. It's a shame, though I'm not as active on here as I used to, so I can't complain too much about it.
like
no. pfo!
Also possibly for "high score" bragging reasons but that's more of a secondary motivation thing lol
It’s still feasible to do, just means I’ll have to get a snapshot of my data on the 30th of June. Definitely would be nice to have that reporting somewhere
Notes notifications should not have been impacted; only the items listed in the journal have been.
I hope this helps! :3
I started in 2018 so I dont have one that old but if I did
What about old journals we can write??
Any user with content that dates from the start of their account would not have seen the content itself removed.
I hope this helps! :3
Edit: He just came up to my bedroom and I showed him this comment, he laughed.
That's part of future planning. But we've got work to do before we get there, and there will be a notification about the auto-removal before it becomes live. :3
But when it comes to Discord or Bluesky usually it's either things I don't really care much or I'm talking with my friends or other peoples so I go clear out the notification ASAP.
But wait....that's accounts marked as deceased. Ah! There are some accounts that the users have died but obtaining proof of death is hard....
Personally I don't view this as system flaw, rather people piling unnecessary amount of who they watch, without even actually going through their artworks/updates. To me that just feels weird to see on any platform, honestly, people watching 1000+ accounts without any realistical way to keep up with all of them (which additionally devalues followers count as a whole as well).
Regarding notifications here though, I am speaking as someone, who didn't catch this website at its birth. Based on comments here - people really had different approach to notifications initially. Although I can understand keeping Watchers, Favorites and Comments for personal motivation and gratitute purposes, collecting Submission notifs is just weird flex for not reason, truly...
What about me?
I'd personally peg notification decay at exactly one year, because that's very easy to understand and communicate, and it's hard to imagine any life circumstances that would necessitate more than that. They could probably be more aggressive and it'd be fine, but anything would be better than ones pushing *twenty* years ago. Yeesh.
I'm not trying to judge you because I just want to know what in your psychology compelled you to use this website's counter for that.
Although all I want is to have:
26S
26J
26C
26W
26N
Why 26? One for each letter of the alphabet.
There's no real harm in that, right?
Well, I guess I have a question, Does this purge apply to my watches? Or rather the new submissions my watches upload?
Because if so, that might screw me up as I like exploring even years back to where it all started for memories sake.
I'm just very scared to see how everyone else will react, considering what I've seen before...
Honestly, not a huge deal, just a bit of an oopsie doing it early lol
At least the other notifs, including the 360217 submission notifs are safe.
It IS a bit ironic how we weren't notified about the notification removal, which is pretty funny in hindsight haha, but considering the circumstances, it can't be helped haha.
I understand though. Well, I will have to be DOWNLOADING next time so this will not happen again...
It hurts, but if there is a good reason, I get it.
But I think it'll be very good since there's a lot of people who rarely visit the site or who have abandoned their account, so I think it will be good to have the notif removed from theses accounts. And... Yeah I have friend who just have like + 500 notifs and never delete theses so I think it'll force some cleaning!
Thank you for the hard work!
Also unrelated, your icon is adorable
Now I wipe them once a day when I'm at my PC instead
Someone's popular!
not that it matters to me, I usually clean my things every week or month XD
But it will be nice to know for how long one can estimate a notification to be there before being deleted by the system.
And also, it's a good way to let users know that.
Understood.
Thank you for the information.
<this is a joke.>
I have several journals I've not cleared out which are made in remembrance of people who've died.
I'm curious as to the total file size of the files holding the notifications? I have to imagine it's in the terabytes at this point, having to store at minimum the links or numerical ID to each [submission / journal / comment] in an ordered list for each person on the scale FA operates at HAS to have a wildly huge total file size.
Each table contains the source of the notification (who performed the action), the target of the notification (the submission or action that the action was done on) and the time that notification was generated. All of which are numbers.
I went to query how many records were in the submissions notification table in total. It took roughly 10 minutes for it to return the *count* of the number of records in the table. 14,547,907,692 by the way. /Just/ for submissions. Not including favorites, journals, or other notifications
I mean, one extra hour is not the end of the world, and it wasn't all that long ago that a botched maintenance happened. I don't say this to humiliate anyone, just a reminder that humans are capable of unintentionally making mistakes even though one is confident of one's work.
I will also suggest to prune accounts that have had extremely long periods of inactivity (i.e. 10-12y+) as well as permanently banned accounts. They take some amount of space too, don't they? It's a draconian measure, sure... but it's not like those accounts / galeries are going to become active again in the next eleven days... right?
Alternatively, inactive accounts could just be given a special flag that more aggressively prunes notifications from.
Just some suggestions worth discussing, I think. Or maybe not, I'm no psychic.
Hopefully the future-planned auto removal is a bit generous though, as I tend to maintain comment notifications for my own tracking of which artists I'm still waiting for commissions/ychs to be completed from, though it won't be the end of the world for me if not, as I can always switch to a local tracking form, it's just convenient for me as its right there when I check my notifs ahah
It is the USERS' responsibility to keep some of their dearest things on their computer or on paper for reference or keepsake. A site can go and do so much for it to maintain itself-like how I learned from Twitter just before it turned into X.
For those like this, I will say to them,
"Oh come on! Are you treating them like spam on your email account(s) and never delete them?! FA is not like that..." 😒👎
And all of that also applied to the front page too, by the way, effectively burrying any upcoming or small time artist into permanent obscurity. It was utter madness! UTTER MADNESS I SAY!!!
Unless you wajt them for metrics like one person mentioned, it's just building up a number for dopamine of hooray increasing number at the cost of damaging user experience and costing more money for the site. There's dozens of others ways and places to see numbers go up and get that satisfaction from it...
Super glad this is happening, thanks for doing it and shocked there will always be people complaining about any feature even the good ones. I get not wanting some changes (I'm one who grumped about classic mode and changing some tagging) but just can't please some people!
I really did mean to reply to that comment 2 years ago… I was just about to do it, really!
If I had to choose what gets purged between notifs and actual art, journals, etc. I'd just the notifs every times, especially if it's causing problems on the site.
since i joined i had quite a bit of notifications i guess its okay
not a really big deal after all LoL
Notifications get cut down to 6 months? The earliest Notification I have at the moment is Feb 2025
So you will lose that Notification from February because it's older then six months.
Like of course you're not going to look through comment notifications or journals submissions notifications ect to find one from one or two or even three years ago and I had noticed from time to time that the numbers altered slightly
So its just notifications, no notes or journals we made or comments we wrote one a upload or two.
Just the notification that informs us it's there?
That is correct. The "content" was not affected; only the notifications that are older than the dates mentioned above were.
And obviously I try to delete useless notes from time to time but some have some important information like a artist's details on what they do and don't make ect
I guess I'm just a bit worried about certain things disappearing and then questioning myself what would be the point of making something if it's gonna just disappear after a month or ao
I don't think my small amount of notification purging helped but I did it anyways
Though something was weird about my notif-count, but thought "Oh, probably just the auto-purge kicking in." uwu
Also echoing a lot of the comments here but I really can't imagine saving notifications indefinitely. I'll let some fave/watch notifs pile up for a few days after an upload for the dopamine but I'll always erase them by the next week. If I really wanted to save one, I'd take a screenshot.
Unless your most recent notifications were older than the dates mentioned in the journal, they would not have been impacted.
I hope this helps!
Hopefully you can at some point upgrade the database to more efficiently store notification data in the first place.
I thought it was just me
edit: I'm not really into saving notifications myself, but figured it would be worth a mention.
I'm at 628,350
Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Sorry for being a burden on the system but big number go up makes me happy.
I mean, not about whole-sale clearing. It has to be done.
But I like to leave a pic in my submission inbox to easily check new incoming and its usually a comm im very excited over.
Could you please at least consider *NOT* removing watches/faves? Even if it's an option that requires being subscribed? The rest I could handle, I think, but not those two.
... @ devs/admins, remove this comment if you wish, but I felt like I needed to type this while i could still bring myself to do so.
What makes the notifs different?
Obviously, this doesn't help with what was lost, but something I've learned in being on the internet for so long is that if I don't make a point to make a personal copy of anything I find incredibly important, I will use it. Today with FA, it was a mistake, in the future there will be ample warning, but there could be many other services that could loose important information without warning.
I really suggest making a point to make a copy of anything important to you to hold on to, so that no matter what happens you can take comfort in knowing you have a backup saved. Screen caps, saving web-pages, re-creating something in a document, anything that makes the information easy to save and access. You'll be glad you did.
It always effectively boils down to "Hey you should let the database constantly break down and destroy the site for everyone, because otherwise it's unfair on me."
If you're not currently getting help, I hope you'll at least consider it.
(There's also some people who like to save everything they get.)
"A reminder for why we need to clear old notifications from our database: The impact on our system is immense, and can cause site slowdowns, inefficient use of space, and query lockups. Currently, even after this accidental clearing, the notifications table still takes over a terabyte of space and has billions of rows populated. The notifications system was built with a smaller site in mind, and because of that we are now seeing the limits of scaling that system."
When this website was made back in 2005, they didn't exactly futureproof for becoming an absolute behemoth with tens of millions of uploads.
Well atleast me watcher one wasn't touched yet, i do like seeing it so i can see how long some have been following
Google Chrome, for example, has a page on how to use bookmarks here, with mobile instructions as well: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/188842?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
Might resort to making a links-journal in the meantime so I don't forget stuff.
It's neat seeing staff talking with users in the comments.
okaaay
Honestly, I think putting a year's limit tops on notifications should be the norm. If it's costing the website terabytes worth of resources, that's just common sense.
That reminds me. I have to nuke mine. It's gotten too big from being off the site so much.
Super easy to soft through too
Mofo there's a big red button for that specific reason. Don't give me that.
Leilani goes to do that now.
I usually purge submission/favorite/journal notifications roughly monthly, so hopefully I'm not a big load on the DB myself, but I do hope the April 3rd update fixes the comments notifications, which I usually like to keep to remember those convos
I can sort of get it. Some people like to hoard numbers. Some people like a gallery that is just the stuff that the people they like upload. Some people like easy-reference links.
But at the same time...ai yi yi yi yi. There's so many better ways to do that...
The only time I let my numbers grow is faves/watchers between upload sessions, and even that's only 15-30 days, and that's just to see how a batch of uploads does in that time. I have yet to see a good excuse for the hoarding of anything, or the keeping of old uploads, that isn't solved by bookmarking or downloading. Just...wow.
If something is that important to you, screenshot, bookmark it, favorite it
And in the time it took for people to complain about it, they could've gone through a few dozen of said notifications, going through some 10 minutes a day won't kill you
For example, right now I have a clickable link to "5S" on my top bar -- this means I have five submissions that I can look at.
You can send a ticket of the "Feedback" type, which will reach the team and be added to our list.
I hope this helps! :3
I'm an animal and I'm just as susceptible to silly hoarding behavior as anypony else is and I don't want to diminish that, but I think the bigger reason I have trouble keeping up with clearing notifications is that I do want to keep a record of recent notifications, but once they get out of control I either need to delete them by paw page-by-page or clear all of them.
If there was a button on my notifications page that let me clear notifications older than one-to-two months, I would regularly press it. Or, maybe a way where I could pin a notification and nuke everything except pinned notifications?
I try not to be too bad about this, but I know my favorites at the very least are out of control, and literally it's just that every time I go look at the page to clear them I think "ugggh but all I can do is nuke them"
Though I do wonder if there's a way to preserve them for people who want them (like, once you hit X number of notifications, or the notifications hit a certain age, you just turn them into a number that increments instead of preserving all the tables that are associated with those notifications, and then when you go far back enough into your notifications it just says "excess notifications truncated" or something to that effect). And of course, clearing notifications yourself clears that number too.
Not sure it's necessarily worth spending the time to implement that logic but I figure I'd put the idea out there.
Yes, it's absolutely silly to hoard them. But I do think a lot of critters are going to hesitate to hit the nuke button and if they could be like "okay, I have this downloaded and it's on my hard drive, it *doesn't need to be on FA's servers" - I bet more critters would do it.
Heck, I would *LOVE*, absolutely adore being able to export submission notifications, because it would be easier for me to sort them locally - I hesitate to clear out the recent ones but like.. it would be much easier if I could open them up in a spreadsheet and sort them into categories and stuff.
If critters want to hoard stuff, fine - but it doesn't necessarily need to be hoarded on specifically FA's servers. X3
If I look at the submission gallery for those that have been posted 6 months ago and older and I save the link to these gallery pages, after the downtime will I still be able to see them or will they be gone alongside the numbers in the upper right corner?
By the way I should mention I understand why this is being done and I'm not against it.
Yours is:
Comments Earned: 274
Comments Made: 251
But thank you.
As long it's long reasonable into the past, auto purging is fine. I do feel like notifications there is less of is probably fine to keep around for longer. I did kinda like the number going up which is why I never nuked mine haha.... <_<
Needed, yes
Wanted? No but it's required
It is helpful since it clears up a lot of space and helps makes the site run smoother.
Wanted? Maybe, maybe not, but it is necessary and required to make the site smoother.
Very much understood why it had to be done, and I know a lot of users are going to have their "but it was -convenient- that the Recycle Bin held my files" wake-up call with this. For me personally I'm a habitual notification clearer so it won't impact me at all, but I do sympathize with folks with other organizational means.
Dergs gonna be dergs
If there's possibly a way FA staff could allow access to just the arts of users that didnt nuke their galleries and not a their disabled page, then this wouldnt be so bad for memorial/memento sakes
Is there some other reason why submission comments would exist in my notification without being reflected in the number at the top, or is that some consequence of the purge?
Seems like something that should be addressed en masse after you start the real purging, if that isn't already the plan!
People are lazy or prioritized "number go up" over everyone's benefit
I'm currently deleting notes that are almost 13 years old.
we're talking about notifications
the "5S 3C 420N 67TT" at the top
These build up and cause bloat, thus the plan to prune.
AFAIK, notes that have been read are not an issue.
I always reset the number to zero because it annoys me to see the number at the top of my Firefox extension.
Yes, I have an extension installed so I can see my notifications even outside of the FurAffinity website.
And unfortunately, people here have kinda proven you can't leave it up to them. They've posted multiple announcements stating this was impacting the website in a negative manner, and asked people to help them out and start cleaning house on their own volition. As you can see by the many upset comments, some have a "my numbers are more important than the website and community" mentality.
however since some people seem to be hell bent on keeping every single notification, what about committing old notifications to a file per user? given the type of data, is extremely easy to compress efficiently.
this could conceivably even be reloaded per request (button: "load old notifications, this may take a while") and then async repopulate that users rows. I suspect not many people would use this feature. alternatively an option to export it directly could be implemented.
Some people have accounts that are more like historical record keeping than anything else.
At least give us a way to see every comment and shout we made.
This TBH, I hope now this feature request will be pushed on top of the queue :3
Also a feature that allows to purge notifications older than week (or a month) manually
As well as bookmark them in your browser. Those two things will be safer than a random FA notif
So now I'm curious - I'd want to know how much disk space gets freed when the notification purge happens. Would that be something we could be told at some point after the maintenance?
Stop hoarding useless data and don't get upset when its cleared.
FA is not a site for you to hoard things you should have already looked at the week you got it.
hmm. I think I'll use my bookmark for this
Athus was on there.
Alas, it is what it is. Nuked everything.
(Also, 2009? Dang thats a long time ago.)
I like looking through old interactions sometimes, and while notifications are not great at that, it's the only thing I know of.
I will say though that I think personally I'd prefer it if they auto-cleared after a full year, just cause I admit it can be easy to drop off activity for a few months... 6 months feels a bit too quick to me somehow. But that's just my opinion!
(Sympathy to those that lost comments from friends that have passed though. I'm firmly on the side of being baffled at ppl STILL hoarding kajillions of notifs when it's been explained numerous times why that causes issues... but I do understand why sometimes you do just want to hang onto one or two comments for personal reasons. I think I suggested this last time the issue came up, would it be possible to handle notif purging so it only kicks in if someone has X amount of notifs? like for example, someone that only has 10 notifications - that won't trigger the purge - but after it reaches, IDK 200 or something, they get a warning "Oldest notifs will be cleared in 5 days" or something like that? I feel like that'd be a good compromise... or just the ability to "lock" up to like 10-15 notifs as has also been suggested in the past. idk, I'm definitely in favour of a big clean-out - I'm genuinely impressed at how generous y'all are being with it, SO many sites would've just pulled the trigger and told their users to deal with it long before now, so glad y'all aren't doing that! - but I can see and understand the side of "I just wanted to keep a small handful of old notifs around" too)
If that were made into an optional feature, it could work like this:
OFF - the notifications are cleared after six months and the numbers only show the amount of uncleared notifications, same as how it works now
ON - the notifications are cleared after six months but the current stats stay up in the corner. When there is a new notification the number gets some kind of indicator next to it, like a "•" or something, which shows that there are unread notifications. Once the notifications are read or automatically cleared the indicator goes away. Optionally, maybe the user could get to decide which specific stats to keep visible with the rest behaving normally. To be clear, keeping the numbers visible wouldn't keep their notifications from being cleared, it would just be a real-time counter of the total amount of watchers/comments/faves/etc. that they have
With this implementation everyone should be happy, no? It would mean a lot to everyone on the site who's been using the unread notifications for this exact purpose, and it should clear up a lot of space to just store a few numbers per user instead of all the notification data
All of this information is available on your profile page both under "Stats" and "Watchers". Is there something different about the notifications that these profile stats do not fulfill?
...and like 20 others.
Heck, if I were yall, I'd purge every single one for every single user as soon as possible, and then start your 6 month old purges down the line. Once you've reached terabytes of space with billions of rows being populated, the users have lost the right to whine, and the team has to do what's best for the site.
I always wondered if those notifications took some amount of room. But I was not ready for a terabyte!
as quite the shock. Not to mention dropping from 1000+ comments to just 7 made we kind of worried that I had lost a lot of comments from other users. It would have been nice if there had been a bit more
clarification upon this happening cause nothing in the news said that this was going to happen today. Perhaps the big question I like to know is if notifications are going to be cleared on a regular basis
automatically then how often should that cleaning take place? The journals section and favorites were the only notifications of mine that were not affected. Still with so many people having notifications it has
made me question how I should implement my own notification system for my own website.
Your notifications are not connected to any comments, watches or shouts you make or receive. They're still there, but the notification in of itself is gone.
Also if you further read the journal, we are looking at 6-month pruning events if Tech has to initiate it.
But users are free to prune their notifications (and help free up space) anytime.
the time. If this was such a big change then why was this not communicated again in June - Dec of last year? A bit of a heads up on this January or February of this would have been appreciated. Hey we know
we talked about this clean up last year, but we just wanted the community to know that we believe that we will be cleaning up the notification in April as we have a better idea on when we want to make this change.
Now if this happened in March of this year then the miscommunication would have made more sense. Hey sorry guys our tech team jumped the gun and decided to start one month earlier than expected and we just
removed some of the notifications. In the way this happened that is not the case.
Again like some have said earlier maybe checking the amount of notification in each field would have made more sense than a direct purge. The amount of watches I get and favs I get on a regular basis are a minute
drop in the bucket which made less sense to prune those. Now submission and journal notifications on the other hand, I have a few thousand of them. So if you wanted to tailer in deleting notifications I would start
with those rather than faves and watches as those grow slowly. Submissions and Journals comments grow quite big as those tend to be a bit more active than most particularly for most users. So I would suggest to
revise your 6-month purge event and instead ask yourself the question are faves and watches notifications worth the hassle in removing them. The answer to that would be no. Comments on the other hand, I can
see being a medium level. I am not that big where I am getting 100 - 1000 watches or faves every day where that might be warranted. I would assume most would agree with that as faves and watches are a lot
more rare. Tailor your approach going forward to focus on journals, and submissions only. If comments get too big then prune those next. Don't touch the watch and fave notifications, better yet give the users the
ability to archive notification. This way these notification that the users deem are important to them will not be removed. Second of which the way notifications are handled is quite bad, add a pagination system to
notifications that way users can delete their notifications a lot more easier than just purging everything or just the stuff that is currently available as that will get quite annoying very fast. If pruning notifications was a
bit easier than the way the current system is built than more users would free up that space. As things stand now that is not the case.
Number three add the ability to paginate shouts, so that way it is easier to see what some of the previous comments were on a user's page. Fourth make the page management of the shouts page easier by adding
pagination to that page as well, this way it is easier for the user to cleanup their shouts page. This would be a far better improvement than purging notifications cause the current way page management works
could use some improvements. The folder management is quite good at the moment so no fixes needed for that part. Journals, submissions and favorites for page management could use some improvement. While
seeing the number 48 submissions left right is okay, a better system would be showing previous and next buttons instead along with the current page that the user is on. Page shouts page of page management
could use a lot of improvement. At the bottom of the page there is only a check all and remove button for page shouts, which makes for a very difficult shout removing system. The user would have to clear all of
the shouts on the page to proceed to the next which is kind of bad if the user wants to all of the top page comments or finds ones they want to keep as they go. A better system for this would be a previous and
next button with pagination enable so the user can delete what they need off each page and proceed to the next one while keeping the shouts they wish to. This would add a bit of a performance boost to the
website since the user can now control what shouts they wish to remove easier. This is for actual shouts and not the shout notification system. The watchlist system of page management could use a bit of work as
well though I am not yet at the point where I have more than one page. Maybe the ability for each watcher with checkmarks so that way multiple watch list members could be deleted all at the same time
rather than just one a time.
Shouts are already paginated as of last year. You can also manage your shouts en masse and via pages on this page: https://www.furaffinity.net/controls/shouts/
Purging notifications is necessary due to the strain they put on the site. It does not matter what kind of notification they are; the fact that they exist adds to the overall mountain. This a massive database that is in the billions of rows and impacts site performance for everyone. While we appreciate your feedback on these other parts of the site, they are not connected to the notifications system and are not posing the same problems as the notifications system does.
which I find to be a lot more easier to use compared to the Modern format. With a site such as FA having 4 million plus users having 1000 - 6000+ notifications in a given field does add up to quite a lot data used.
I gave both the modern and classic notifications a look and it appears that both are missing pagination. I took a screenshot of the journal section to demonstrate that it is missing previous and next buttons for the
journal notification section. However if it is okay with you I can upload it here to showcase this issue directly here or I can send this image directly to staff for them to look over. I would prefer to upload the
snapshot here for the journal notification as an example if staff are okay with that. It includes usernames and journals, nothing from that to me looks out of the ordinary. Now if this notification section was
improved it would make it easier to delete notifications from the journals as a starting point. I have not deleted the journal notification entries as it is a bit of a chore to not be able to see what is on the nonvisible
notification pages which makes me kind of reluctant to use the nuke journals button, as there are some journal notifications that I would like to keep. So if the visible page is filled up then I can't delete the other
journals that are beyond the visible area. I also would like to keep some journal notifications from 1 year to 3 year old range as some are kind of cool to look back upon.
Maybe offer the users some kind of incentive to remove the notifications so staff does not have to do as much work. How about 25% discount on tickets to furry conventions, fursuit commisions discount, or maybe
a steam card that ranges from $20 - $500 that could be redeemed. Another possible solution to the problem would be rather than a month - 3 month purge cycle how about a simple threshold limit. If the user
notifications per field exceeds lets say 1000 - 6000 put that user's notification to be flagged for deletion. The user would get an email or a pm that says hey your notifications are beyond limit X could you please
drop them close to the Y limit which would be the lower range as we will need to drop your notifications down to this level so that performance is not heavily impacted. Give them 3 weeks or more to drop the
notifications as close to the Y limit as possible. This way the users can keep older journal notifications beyond the 1 year to 3 year range if they drop it close to the Y limit. I am happy to provide more ideas for
fixes as I come up with them.
If the average user has 80 watches total, for 4 million users to have that same amount applied to them that is only 320 million notifications in total which is smaller than the billions you are
mentioning existing in the tables. Now my submissions notifications on the other hand is 6000+ which is a much bigger amount than the 80 watch total you have been decrementing from. Now
if I applied that 6000 number to the 4 million users on this site, that is a total of 24 billion notifications total from everyone just in that one bucket alone. Seems to me like that would be a
bigger bucket to reduce for users if we are indeed concerned about performance issues related to notifications. Granted I would have removed these notifications myself if I was given a
paginated notifications system that I could cycle through page by page. Seems like quite a waste of time and resources to me if you guys are just focused on reducing the amount of watch
notifications that people have.
The purge is only for notifications older than six months AND it is currently paused.
Also maybe make some sort of alert for this happening that appears at the top of the notification page? More my fault but I missed or forgot the announcement for this being planned at all.
I keep my favorite followers in my watch list but delete everything else regulary ... my oomfs ... they will be purged
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11329821/
If the whole point is to reduce the amount of data, then you find out where the bloat is and target that specifically. Notification counts are already cached, so that SHOULD be a piece of cake. Just look for accounts with an excessive number of notifications and run through them one at a time. If someone doesn't have an obscene number of notifications, then you leave it alone. If you're just deleting stuff older than a specific date, you're literally purging a lot of data that has no impact on performance.
Plus, there's a high likeliness that a bug will wipe out everything. You never do a "purge". You step through accounts and do it a bit at a time, to ensure there's some kind of constraints in place to limit damage. The fact that I had multiple people post journals complaining about the same problem in such a short period of time suggests that there was no constraints applied to the purging process. That really concerns me.
But, it's not like Dragoneer or Yak ever listened to me, so I don't expect you guys to, either.
For any web site that's been around as long as FA, I'd guess that 1% of the accounts are "active". Most web sites have less than 10% active accounts. Notifications never really stop being delivered unless the account is disabled. It's safe to say that for those accounts, they can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of notifications each. That's where all your bloat comes from. Purge only the "problem" accounts, and that's likely to wipe out 99% of the database, while not penalizing "active" accounts at all.
I run my own web site and forum, so I have good numbers to go by. It's not at the scale of FA, but the percentages are easy to read.
Again, real developers work the problem using real numbers. You don't guess, and you don't act lazy.
And what's up with tearing other devs down while jerking yourself off? Don't you think that may be part of why people don't listen to you?
Of course he not having problems. He doesn't have the volume to have a problem unless he's paying 1 penny for backend hosting.
I've worked on other systems than my own web site. Nobody visits home pages anymore, so I don't update my own site anymore.
FA is neither your site or your forums. The technologies they used early on for the site, to my understanding, do not fit the use case of what they have now.
I get that people don't like this decision, but what else do they expect from what is essentially a recycle bin with the label of 'notification'?
If they really do have the time to sift through 993989891898429 notifications, then they have the time to archive them. Or had.
Not the site's fault people used a system meant to be temporary for permanent storage.
> The technologies they used early on for the site, to my understanding, do not fit the use case of what they have now.
Which is apparently why they are doing the nuclear option of a purge. Rather than fixing it properly, purge all the data first, then deal with it again in the future. Rinse, repeat.
This would give the user more control over how the go about cleaning up their own notifications.
I could understand outrage if they wanted to delete submissions from a pool of the oldest on the site, but notifications? Something meant to be temporary?
This whole thing is nonsensical.
I have e-mails that go back 25 years. I'm sure that people might ask me, "Why don't you just delete all that old stuff?" The reason is because it's not a problem. My e-mail client can handle it without breaking a sweat.
Sure, almost all of them aren't important to me and I'll never read them again. However, I recently read through some e-mails from my best friend from 20 years ago who just up and disappeared one day, and I have reason to believe he passed away due to health concerns.
If I had so many e-mails that my client was running really slow, then I'd purge some old stuff until the problem went away. That's perfectly sensible.
But when you're deciding what to do with other peoples' data? Aw hell, you didn't need that. POOF!
Gimme a break.
If you really want to keep it, then store it on a device you control. Otherwise, you're basically gambling.
Besides, there's a difference between email and notifications; the former intended to be permanent. How anyone can consider *notifications* as a good storage device is beyond me.
With the way the system is setup at the moment if you find that you have notifications that you want to keep filling up the visible page and there are some that you want to keep that are past the first page,
well you are kind of out of luck at that point because then you are forced to delete those notifications you currently have to get the next ones down. It is not setup in a way for the user for the user to delete
notifications on their own without nuking their entire notifications. Faves and watches don't add a lot of space, submissions, and journal notifications take up more space as watched users fill those up rather
quickly. You could easily get up to 6000 notifications on those alone.
And it's still worth emphasizing that notifications are meant to be temporary. There is no "want" here; especially with a dataset that keeps growing when it wasn't meant to.
Something had to give eventually.
If people ARE deleting their notification... leave them alone.
There, a sensible policy in two sentences. It's not hard.
If people ARE deleting their notifications, then this literally doesn't affect them and they have no reason to cry.
Look, I can be condescending, too.
Hey, I'm an Aquarius. I don't expect the world to be fair, but I do expect it to make sense.
From an outsider perspective on things, it makes total sense as to why they are purging comments, plus you are talking about hundreds of thousands if not millions of accounts all with notifications that keep building up. What if someone quit using the site, or simply forgot to clear notifications? And from what little I do know, there isn't much that can be done aside from "get rid of the old stuff and put in a auto delete to prevent the problem from happening again."
Honestly, it sounds like you are making assumptions about things. You cannot see the backend of the website like the staff can. Plus you insulting them (including Dragoneer, the fuck?) doesn't help prove your point here.
Never said i was, was just throwing my two cents in. As an outsider to this, I wanted to explain what I was seeing.
> rather than doing a purge every few weeks
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't they say that they were programming a proper notification clearing system? As in, notifications six months or older are auto deleted?
> FA has been in bad shape for a long time because the old staff was lazy. Based on the new policy and technical changes, I have no reason to believe things are different now.
Look, I'll level with you here. I have not been around for the old staff, I joined sometime after Dragoneer passed away, so I cannot speak as to how the website used to be or even how he used to be, nor can I do so with Yak. But this whole post (and the one before this post) seems really aggressive to staff, both current and former. I mean... "it's not like Dragoneer or Yak ever listened to me, so I don't expect you guys to, either."
Let me be honest here. If I went to your website and said that, would you listen to me? Probably not. There's got to be a better way to say some of your feedback here.
You can say what you want to me, but honestly I really don't want this to become anymore aggressive than it already is. I cannot speak as to what's best for the site outside of a consumer's perspective since I am not a web programmer, nor do I even have access to the backend to see how it works. I just wanted to put my two cents in and leave it at that (although I really could've worded my post better and seemed less aggressive... I need to stop writing these when I am tired or stressed).
I'm just gonna drop it here since I don't need a fight to start. I'm busy with things and don't need the stress.
Let's suppose you come across a chronic hoarder. You know, one of those people who saves everything to the point where their house is piled high with garbage, there's black mold all over the walls, and civil contractors need to climb over several feet of waste in hazmat suits clearing everything out before the house is condemned by the town and torn down for health reasons.
Shortly after, the town issues a mandate to ALL home owners that any possessions you own that are more than 6 months old will be confiscated by the town and forcibly thrown away, to help prevent future hoarders from becoming a health hazard to the community.
That's what's happening here. It's clearly wrong, even if in the eyes of the town, or other homeowners, it's the right thing to do.
The reason why I'm so aggressive to developers who resort to such policies is because any decent web developer is supposed to know how to deal with these situations properly. If you don't know how to maintain user data on a large-scale web site, you don't deserve to be in this industry. No, I don't expect the average person to know the basics of backend maintenance, but anyone involved in such a large site as FA absolutely should.
> Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't they say that they were programming a proper notification clearing system? As in, notifications six months or older are auto deleted?
They're proposing a monolithic approach, which is technically incorrect and potentially dangerous (database engines aren't perfect, which is why monolithic purges are very bad). It's not they aren't doing anything about the issue, it's that there are far better ways of doing it.
I also found it funny that your lack of knowledge on the subject was the first thing he focused on. Also that 3/4 of his rant was yet again tearing others down to prop himself up.
what if the notifications you wish to save are on separate pages, and you already save the ones you wanted to save on the main page, well then are kind of out of luck if there any you wish to save past the
visible ones. Now if there was a pagination system where you could search through each page at a time and delete the notifications you don't need than more users would be more inclined to do so. This
would reduce the likely hood that the staff would need to purge the notifications from time to time. Second of which if one were to target journal, and submissions to purge first rather than fav and watches
there would far more of a performance improvement in general. Fav and watches notifications are slow growing unless you one of the more popular artists, however for the general population that is not the
case.
Target purging is good when aimed in the right locations where it makes the most sense. There is a difference between purging comments and notification comments. The current system for deleting page
shouts is not very good and could use an upgrade. Page shouts needs a pagination system to make it easier view all the comments not only on the user's page but in the page management system as well.
The current system as a whole only shows the most current page shouts and not the ones below them. This is why having pagination for shouts is important especially for a large website such as this. The
way the removal for notifications and shouts in general is setup at this current moment is quite bad.
Being able to delete notifications by filters is kind of a poweruser/OCD feature, and is likely overkill for the commoner. A simple flag/nuke arrangement would be far easier to implement.
But, I think it's too late for that now. The staff seem pretty adamant that a monolithic purge is the only option. Sigh.
The lingering note tallies dragging down the site and servers are because of that old code base that falls victim to date overload, it gets into a number of bytes that are too high, it nulls out and causes a crash because it has to re-tally all of that information again into the cache.
The purging process has been stalled for years because of every time they announce it, these whiny kids freak out every time because they can't read.
I was never going to get to them myself but because I no longer have a choice it feels like something is being taken from me even though I get all this content for free so it's not really that bad but it still feels like I'm losing something forcibly and that gives me negative feelings and loss of control so I'm going say it's bad. Also, I am unaffected by this personally because I purged the first time you said it would help the site out so I don't know what the point of this large paragraph is, maybe someone will read it and comment "hah hah silly draggy" which will then restore the feeling of control back and make me feel good so perhaps this whole situation is an overall good.Just the notifications.
The ones you see in the upper right of the website when you are logged in.
Ill take the health of the site over my petty need to have big numbers on my notification bar.
Did the support button move recently?
Why is it on the far left?
Did I accidentally merge into the timeline where it's just...on the left?
Here's your collection of Berenstein books.
...Uh- Where do I put these. All my physical books are reference manuals!
Welcome to this timeline :3
But in all seriousness, we announced it on a previous journal. We had to move it in order to comply with ad policies. Anything that can overlay the ad and cause someone to accidentally click is not allowed.
But alright, I probably read that journal and completely missed the fact that the button was moving. I'd wonder why it took me this long to notice but I'm usually on mobile.
Good work and good luck with the maintenance!
This should give me some incentive to clear up my Submissions box. While I'm bummed that the time for downtime was miscommunicated; I'm happy that we now have notice beforehand.
But I understand that might take a lot of work to set up.
Anybody know of a tool to back up that sort of thing?
Mostly for the submissions page. Something to records titles, links, dates in an easily readable format.
I found an extension that mostly works for the other notifications.
Actually, scratch that, it'd need to work for journals as well! XD
It's pretty clear that originally, notifications were thought of as something that somebody might not check for a week or two, when on vacation, or maybe even three months, when they were on summer break from college and not able to access FA. (Remember, kids, you didn't always have your own personal computer to use privately. FA is older than both iPhone and Android.) After that time, critters would log back in, work through their notifications, and then delete them, at least in theory.
The fact that some critters chose to use them in other ways was, uh, unexpected. :)
I do agree with something that's been suggested a few times: give critters a way to download their notifications as a CSV, XLS, or equal. This might not be possible to implement before the currently-planned mass purge, but if it's relatively easy to do so, maybe the purge could be put off for a week or two while this is implemented.
(Because of the hugeness of the notifications table, this might take the form of "click this link to request a takeout, and then come back tomorrow to get your CSV file". This prevents spamming the database with queries. If just doing the SELECT COUNT takes 10 minutes, this is probably necessary.)
This is further afield, but I also agree with another suggestion that's also been made a few times: give people a way to see all their comments from a link on their profile. The count is on your user profile, but not the content. I can get to a few of my comments just because I remember which artwork I commented on, but I can't get to all of them. Depending on how the tables are set up, though, this might be relatively painful.
Thanks!
Keep up the good work 💪🏼
Total comments posted and received is available in the "Stats" portion of your profile page (top-right, right under your bio), alongside number of profile views, favourites received, etc.
And your total number of watchers is available in the "Recent watchers" section, on the right.
All the info's already there. :3
Thanks you a lot!
Courage to all staff members involved in this IT transformation. Working myself in the IT, and having had to manage large databases, I can understand how tedious such work can be.
I could see doing an update where that info is shown in the hamburger menu or in the header bar if people really needed the number goes up buzz
Reminder that storage costs are absolutely obscene now thanks to ActualIdiocy.
Also, for those sad about losing their perceived bookmark for a certain submission/comment/journal, you can still do all the other things available to keep something online! Bookmark it with your browser, save a screenshot of it, clip it and put it into Evernote/Obsidian/etc., that kind of thing. Just takes two seconds of effort!
The total watches, favs and comments earned are already saved. Perhaps for the submission hoarders a increasing number can be voluntarily set up as storing a flat number's gonna be easier than storing 6 million submission notifications. Like, that's what I've seen over here.
In Michael Jordan's words: "Stop it, get some help"
Like, really, consume big numbers in moderation, you're becoming addicts XD
And notifications cleared :D
Which is your most popular submission? Is there a submission time that works best for you? Does the favs-to-comments ratio show any trends?
If you just want a number that goes up, you can play an idler. Or get a clock.
So on May 4th, 2025 we announced that we were planning to start auto-clearing notifications that are older than 6 months.
It will be a rolling 6-month cutoff. If you need to keep track of something for longer, I would recommend using browser bookmarks - many modern browsers can persist these between devices, and you can rename them, sort them, and organize them into folders, plus they will be kept around as long as you want them to be.
It's not too big of a deal honestly, I wanna try to be better about cleaning up my inbox anyway. Just get a tad lazy sometimes lol
Notes are unaffected. However, the contents of any of the items listed above are still there. It's just the notifications for them that have been pruned.
/msg/submissions/ page is the closest thing we have to a 'recent posts by people you follow', our equivilent of Youtube's subscriptions page or Bluesky's Home > Following view.
If we had some way to get the site to produce that page on demand, I wouldn't care if I had notifications for those at all as I'd just scroll through that feed till I got to submissions I'd seen and stop there!
(as opposed to the red "Nuke" button, which will just delete every submission notification, regardless of date. dont press that one if youve got notifications you wanna look at still)
Could the system use an improvement? Sure. What system couldn't benefit from some sort of improvement as tech advances, but let's not downplay the intensity these notification hoarding are costing in system resources.
If it starts wiping my fav gallery I'll be a little upset.
Been meaning to backup all the images, but considering its over a decade worth of saved images, I don't even know where to start.
Thank you for your vigilance!
we need those notifications up.
That despite multiple postings identifying this as an issue and that this was effectively harming the website and impacting it for EVERYONE... yet so many refused to voluntarily start deleting things and instead continued to hoard for their own dopamine kick or whatever purpose at the expense of usability for others speaks loudly.
A compromise I could see is having a number of notifications you can keep, and if you want more, the oldest is unmarked (And FA+ lets you save more notifications)
80075 S 252 W 95C 6947F 466J
I used to keep all my notifications as a kind of history of my time on FA. I liked seeing those numbers go up, it was a dopamine hit kind of thing. But my OCDS would never let ANY of the notes notifications stay.... if someone was directly contacting me I would deal with it immediately
Im not a very popular artist, or particularly good so I figure my numbers are a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of you. But I want to make sure my STATS numbers will remain the same (Im pretty sure they will) since I assume that the stats numbers are single variables that count up but the notifications are more complicated that. Because the stats are the numbers that TRULY matter.
So would nuking right now help the site at all?
So your notifications are good to go! I would look at them, screenshot if you want the memories and then fire away on clearing them. Anything super important you want to keep I would bookmark.
if u tried before, uhhh hmmmmmmmm (embarrassed) just forget it (fleeing)
that's exactly bad news for some people. r.i.p. for your notifs
So, I remember one of the previous journals there was talk about a more API-focused internal interface, which frankly I consider a good idea in general, as that would make things like theme-swapping and a possible phone app a lot easier if there's a stricter separation between 'getting the data from the database' and 'displaying the data'.
Thing is, having a bound app would make it a lot easier to offload a lot of the notification history from the central database to edge devices for those people who actually want to keep that information, while at the same time making it easier to justify cleaning that information out of the central database for those who don't want to keep it. Of course, there's still some potential privacy concerns (notifications can be effectively removed by someone else who removes the original post the comment was made on, and the app would still potentially have information about the original post that the main website will no longer display aside from 'this was removed', so there may be a potential way to leak information around any attempt at blocking someone, at least for posts that predated the block) but there would be ways within the app to deal with that.
... I'm gonna get Puddles. >.>
And the Ghostbusters.
Do you press the button and kill your dopamine hit? Or do nothing and let EVERYONE ELSE have a slower site?
The shopping cart might also work
I don't remember the numbers anymore, but at some point I did a cleanup, deleted all my notifications and unfollowed everyone so I could re-follow the artists I wanted to follow.
The numbers started going up again and I didnt clear them but this time out of lazyness.
Today, though, the numbers don't go up as much because I'm using FABUI, and if you have that extension, keeping the notifications clear is good.
For notifications that are merely "algorithmic" (+faves, +watch) and only ever notify one person, they get flagged as read/unread in their source table instead of being added to the general notifications table?
I mean, if that's a problem, I suppose the logical thing would be to put it as a future task so that this doesn't happen again?
I REALLY hope they delete the submissions from the notifications, but keep the number as what it is
I have other things I wanna say, but I wont, so this is the only part you notification hoarders are gonna get. (this section anyway)
I'm really confused by all of the people who are saying they don't care because they like to watch the numbers go up. You'd think that someone with hundreds of notifications from stuff they like would actually care about the site that the 'stuff' is being hosted on. If you like watching numbers go up, there are plenty of other ways to achieve that visual satisfaction without intentionally disabling the site for everyone else. It's immature and narcissistic behavior.
I like statistic and analysis, so I used to track sometimes how numbers forming after an upload. So time to time I used to archivate them and then deleting them. But lately I didn't had time for that tedious work.
So should be possible an option to download notifications as a txt or csv ?
Each submission shows its Views, Comments, and Favorites in the top right. As the submission owner, you can click on the Favorites number to see the names of all users who favorited the submission.
You also have a Stats page, https://www.furaffinity.net/stats/l.....n/submissions/ which you can also get to by clicking "Stats" at the top of your user profile. You can sort by date, views, favorites, and comments to see what your most popular submissions are by each stat.
"I'm doing my part"
(We ignore the accidental mass purge of 2024 for everything else)
I use the comments to keep a list of commissions I'm owed too
My solution is to have a notification box, revamp the Noti-bar to include: a Bar-Graph Icon to go to stats immediately, a Bell for notifications (with a red dot to indicate a new one), and a mailbox icon that goes to dms because I feel the same about stats as I do DM's, it feels really out of my way to search for where DM's are.
Granted, it's not as nice as seeing numbers on the screen, but it's an idea to not only alleviate the issue I mentioned here a bit but also tidy up menu space a tad.
the site can't handle all th enotifs and probably is why the site has issues alot of the time I dont see the point it collecting notifs like they are... pokemon cards..?
I'd be more okay with nuking more often if there was a better way to keep track of things like Total Likes, Total Comments, Total Subscriptions on the notification space. Etc.
Brain see big number = dopamine; brain forced to make big number into small number = depression.
Way one: Stats on your profile page. This covers everything l.
Way two: Stats page which covers by submission.
What I would prefer are Icons that lead to these sections; Something like Graph for Stats, Bell for Notifications, and a mailbox for DM's (I feel the same about Dm's as I do Stats)- they feel very out of my way to get to when I just hop on here to post art and check my submission inbox page (Which I have bookmarked, but I feel I shouldn't need to bookmark every page for my own convenience.
Heck, I only know about this because it was directly under the notification tab- Besides that, I wouldn't know about this announcement to begin with. I would much rather have icons than Notification numbers if the numbers in general are the issue.
If y'all really want to help the site, donate some money and give POLITE suggestions. Whining in the comment section just makes you look spoiled and ungrateful.
My question is, are these 30W 60C 30F 30J the reason that slow down the website? Or is there have a way to reach that's 970 I just don't know?
If it's the first one, then is there any meaning for those who can earned more then 30 notifications each everyday to delete their notifications? If it's the second one, how do I reach them
Why hiding them since you kept all these information
Why keeping them since you were always hiding them
What ever I just nuke them
Delete the top right numbers, add the red dot and small bell, let every notification exist for two years and clean them. That's all I can suggestion