status-monitor Favicon Notification

Hello,

We've been considering it for a while:

• https://www.namepros.com/posts/6694382/

Please share some examples with us of other XenForo forums doing it. (You can share them in our private support area if they'll violate rule 1.29.)

Thanks!


For internal use only: https://www.namepros.com/conversations/3020481/

The examples you provided via DM are most likely using XenForo 2.x; our software is based on XenForo 1.x. We can't easily upgrade because we've made significant modifications to the original software--including rewriting large chunks of it--and it would be quite a project to migrate all our changes to 2.x, which is a complete rewrite of XenForo. (The problem is that XenForo is really designed for smaller sites; when using it in that context, it works fine, but it requires significant changes to work well on sites with a lot of traffic. We typically see upwards of 100 requests per second after edge caching; vanilla XenForo can't reasonably handle that.)

If we implement notification alerts, we're more likely to use the official WHATWG notifications API, as it's largely replaced favicon badges. It gives browsers complete control over how to display the notifications; some may even opt to show a favicon badge, but it's up to the browser. This would also permit push notifications on mobile. Traditional favicon badges are notoriously fickle, especially in bookmarks; they won't work properly in many browsers, and even the browsers for which they do work exhibit inconsistencies. They also rely on the browser polling bookmarked sites for updates; some browsers refuse to do this due to privacy concerns. I wouldn't be surprised if the favicon badges you're seeing aren't actually favicon changes, but rather badges triggered by the notifications API. I can't confirm this as I don't see favicon badges for alerts on the example sites you provided in my current browser.

There are add-ons that provide favicon badges in XenForo 1.x, but we can't use them; we've completely rewritten XenForo's alert delivery system to overcome a number of problems with XenForo's implementation that prevented caching.