Yes, I'd really like to put a little (1) in the title when something happens on the website. This will also mark the tab on some browser as activity, which could be really helpful. It is also the first step towards making browser notifications work (which is actually really simple).
Matty is right though: we are very strained by our infrastructure. We don't get enough premium subscriptions to afford better servers, which means we're really careful with calling the server to update whether you have new messages or turns. In fact, once you leave the tab, we try to detect that as much as possible, and stop updating the site. This is shown by a little hourglass in the top bar. Once you move your mouse or type on the keyboard, we'll immediately start updating. We do this because if you're not looking at the tab, it's not very important to update the tab in the background, and it means we can save server resources to make the site faster for people currently using it.
As you can imagine, if we don't update the tab, we also can't update the tab title while you're away from it. Web sockets, which Matty is talking about, allow us to "push" changes to the client instead of having the client ask the server for updates every five seconds. This would be a lot better, but we need to make sure we have sufficient browser support for web sockets, and it also means rewriting basically all code that interacts between frontend and backend.
I am really excited about this idea and many related ideas, but I am afraid this work depends on us doing some big rework of our technical infrastructure before we can support it.
Yes, I'd really like to put a little (1) in the title when something happens on the website. This will also mark the tab on some browser as activity, which could be really helpful. It is also the first step towards making browser notifications work (which is actually really simple).
Matty is right though: we are very strained by our infrastructure. We don't get enough premium subscriptions to afford better servers, which means we're really careful with calling the server to update whether you have new messages or turns. In fact, once you leave the tab, we try to detect that as much as possible, and stop updating the site. This is shown by a little hourglass in the top bar. Once you move your mouse or type on the keyboard, we'll immediately start updating. We do this because if you're not looking at the tab, it's not very important to update the tab in the background, and it means we can save server resources to make the site faster for people currently using it.
As you can imagine, if we don't update the tab, we also can't update the tab title while you're away from it. Web sockets, which Matty is talking about, allow us to "push" changes to the client instead of having the client ask the server for updates every five seconds. This would be a lot better, but we need to make sure we have sufficient browser support for web sockets, and it also means rewriting basically all code that interacts between frontend and backend.
I am really excited about this idea and many related ideas, but I am afraid this work depends on us doing some big rework of our technical infrastructure before we can support it. :)
“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
- Speaker for the Dead, O.S. Card