Triffin:
Ahhh, you are correct that the "monitoring" components already exist, i.e. inbox counter, subjectmarks counter, etc. Those components not only exist, but they are up to date in "real-time".
However, that's not the hard part.
You've probably noticed that your inbox counter only updates (higher or lower) every time you refresh your page, i.e. either by clicking the refresh button or clicking on another page link.
We could automatically refresh the page, but that causes it's own set of problems - even if we do it on a periodic basis. Plus, that still wouldn't provide us with a "real-time" solution, and it would only work when someone was using SI.
We might be able to let user's open a separate browser window that would "refresh" automatically in the background, and just check for new messages, but again that means significant hits to our servers which could get very costly and slow down the rest of the site.
I'm not saying that we can't surmount all of these issues. I'm just saying that - in this case - it's not as simple as it sounds.
Would welcome any other thoughts that you have, however, so please keep 'em coming.
Thanks,
Bryan |
