Meditation again

we might come to a point where we need a feature to consolidate multiple messages for the same node into a single one.

For instance consider

• I'm following you
• watching a thread
• you're answering to one of my posts there

This will generate 3 messages in the CB.

I already had this effect in the past when I considered a personal node for deletion...

Edit

Probably it's possible on the message box level to see if there is already a message for the same node.

This is certainly not a high priority problem, but probably discussing it might lead to an elegant solution.

suggestion

Is it possible to extend the message table with a field node_id to be able to group duplicate messages from watches/replies together?

A poor man's (and maybe faster to implement) approach is to have a LIKE statement which is searching msgtext for the %[id://NODE_ID]% text.

Actually I'm not sure if grouping should be done on the writing (avoid duplicates) or reading side.

Having to delete multiple duplicate messages is a bit cumbersome, and especially fiddly on mobile.

That's easier solved by avoiding duplicates.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

Update

Having a field node_id would also allow listing all messages concerning a node together with the node's display.

Update

A third approach: I'm thinking about writing a display filter which is parsing and grouping the messages. This could also be done as Nodelet hack 🤔

I just realized that AnoMonk can see and click this feature too, when visiting a homenode

Does this make any sense?

edit

That's also the case for Watch for: Direct replies / Any replies when being locked out.

You might need to purge the database now from my experiments...

Thank you for the report! Fixed! Actually, there was nothing to clean up in the db, because, even though the links were there, the operation invoked by clicking one of the links filters out Anonymous Monk.