I'm a new junior developer joining to this awesome community. I'm developing my first big personal project, and I'm stuck with this specific part.
I would like to build a feed notification system like Facebook with the following features:
Track different models and relationships, for example: new badges earned, new comments in subscribed models, new posts by followed users, new comments on my posts, new likes on my posts...
Group the activities, for example, instead of have 400 activities for each likes in my post, has just one notification that says "User X and 399 more likes your post"
Be possible to mark notifications as readed to don't see them again, at least you explore past notifications.
Scalability, good perfomance, and possible integration in the future in an APP developed for example with Iconic framework.
Push notifications are optional, it's ok if the user need to refresh the page to see the new notifications.
So for that, I have readed a lot of. I have watched some Railcast Videos, followed tutorials, but still I'm not really sure how to begin.
I have considered the following methods:
Use public_activity gem, adding a new a new field "readed" to the migration. And thinking how to manage grouped activites. But I have seen a lot of complains about perfomance. I'm expecting to have around 50000 users in my website in the first month (I already have the users), with peaks of 500-1000 users online. So maybe this is not the best way to go... as I would have a lot of activities, a lot of "notifications" and a lot of users.
Use a system like https://getstream.io/ because they also have integrations available for RoR and Ruby. The main concern here is about pricing, because checking it, if I'm not wrong, with that number of users, with around 10 notifications per user per day, I would be paying probably more than 200$ month, and always keep growing as the users grow.
Build my own system, maybe using Redis. But maybe this would be too complex and require a lot of time for a good, efficient and working code.
So still, considered these option, I don't know which one is best for me, or if it's another possibilities.
If someone have asked before these questions, please let me know your thoughts and what you think is the correct way to go.
Thank you !! :)
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I have an SAAS online product (it affects people with twitter accounts, suggests people\pages to follow based on your previous interests).
I would like to add the option to schedule tweets (an ability to not send a tweet now, but schedule it for later, so a person can schedule several tweets at a time and it will be send out during the week) to my product, because I have noticed a lot of people pay for it.
How can I add this functionality to my product, in a way that will be competitive and people will use it?
I would greatly appreciate any help with this, since it's a key for my product's growth.
Thanks!
I am currently working on an application in Rails (though language/framework shouldn't matter for this question since it is more of a theoretical one). I'm working on wrapping my head around this problem:
Say I am tracking millions of blogs online and am plugged into their RSS feeds. My app pings these feeds every few few minutes to see if there has been any new activity across any of these millions of blogs. If there is any new activity, I want to alert users of my application who have signed up to receive alerts for specific blogs that there has been an alert.
Does it make sense to have a user_blog_alerts table (where a user can specify custom keywords to be alerted about) and continuously check this table against every new entry that comes in from my feed? And when there is a match, to add them to a queue (using Redis)?
What is the best, most efficient way to build and model this alerting system? Am I even thinking about this in the right way? Are there any good examples or tutorials on this when working with such large amounts of data?
I'm not sure what the right way to do this is, but the thought of continuously scanning a table over and over sounds exhausting (ie. unscalable).
Off the top of my head, what if you created a LIST for every blog in Redis. The values would be the user IDs of those who wanted an alert. The key name would contain the blog id (ex: "user_blog_alerts:12345").
Then when you got a new post for blog 12345 it's a simple lookup to see if that key exists. If it does, then fire off alerts for each user in the list.
There are some gems out there to instantly have a simple messaging system for users which I have looked at but they don't really fit the bill in terms of having a way to easy customize them.
Therefore I would like to ask some suggestions of gems that you consider be good for an instant messaging on a site, or discuss how one could implement this functionality.
I have built a simple system before that consisted of a messages table like this:
inbox
outbox
friend request
replies
id|message_id|sender_id|receiver_id|is_reply|is_friendreq|message
I'm thinking of storing everything in this one table and get all messages of a certain user where the user_id == receiver_id. This is very basic. I'm learning Rails and try to learn how to implement this on best Rails practice, so any tips/suggestions/ideas are more than welcome.
I need to develop an application which should help me in getting all the status,messages from different servers like Twitter,facebook etc in my application and also when i post a message it should gets updated in all the services. I am using authlogic for authentication. Can anyone suggest me what gems/plug-ins i can use..
I need API help to get all the tweets/messages to be displayed in my application and also ways to post the messages to the corresponding services by posting it from my application. Can anyone help me from design point.
Walk through what you'd want to do in your head. Imagine the working site, imagine your webapp working before you start. So your user logs in (handled by authlogic) and sees a textbox called "What are you doing right now?". The user fills in a status message and clicks "post". The status message appears at the top of their previously posted messages.
Start with the easy part. Create a class that posts to two services. Use the twitter gem and rfacebook to post to two already defined services. In the future, you'll want to let the user associate services to their account and you would iterate through the associated services and post the message to each. Once you have this working, you can refactor or polish the UI a bit to round out this feature. I personally would do the "add a social media account to my profile" feature towards the end.
Harder is the reading of the data (strangely enough) because you're going to have to figure out how to store it. You could store nothing but I suspect you'd run into API limits just searching all the time (could design around this). I would keep a little cache of posts associated to the user's social media account. In this way, the data model would look like this:
A user has many social media accounts.
A social media account has many posts. (cache)
Of course, now you need to schedule the caching of the posts. This could be done manually, based on an event (like when they login) or time based. So when the update happens, you load up the posts for that social media account and the user will see the posts the next time they hit the page. For real-time push to the client's browser while they stare at the screen, use faye (non-trivial) and ajax to pull the new posts to the top of the social media stream view.
The time based one is tricky because you'd either have to have a cron job run or have rails handle it all with a gem like clockwork. But then you have to leave rails running. I've also solved this by having a class in /lib do all the work and a simple web call kicks off the update. But it wasn't in a multi-user use case. So that might not work. In any case, you'll want to have some nice reusable code for these problems since update requests can come from many different sources.
You'll also have to deal with the API limits. When pulling down content from twitter, you won't get everything. That will just have to be known by the user or you'll have to indicate a "break in time" somehow.
The UI should be pretty easy (functionally anyway), because you know which source the post/content is coming from. It'd be easy to throw a little icon next to the post to display which social media site it's coming from.
Anyway, good luck, sounds like a fun project.
I've been working on a web app that could be prone to user abuse, especially spam comments/accounts. I know that RECAPTCHA will take care of bots as far as fake users are concerned, but it won't do anything for those users who create an account and somehow put their spam comments on autopilot (like I've seen on twitter countless times).
The solution that I've thought up is to enable any user to flag another user and then have a list of flagged users (boolean attribute) come up on a users index action only accessible by the admin. Then the users that have been flagged can become candidates for banning(another boolean attribute) or unflagging. Banned users will still be able to access the site but will have greatly reduced privileges. For certain reasons, I don't want to delete users entirely.
However, when I thought of it, I realized that going through a list of flagged users to decide which ones should be banned or unflagged could be potentially very time consuming for an admin. Short of hiring someone to do the unflagging/banning of users, is there a more automated and elegant way to go about this?
I would create a table named abuses, containing both the reported user and the one that filed the report. Instead of the flagged boolean field, I suggest having a counter cache column such as "abuse_count". When this column reaches a predefined value, you could automatically "ban" the users.
Before "Web 2.0", web sites were moderated by administrators. Now, the goal is to get communities to moderate themselves. StackOverflow itself is a fantastic case study. The reputation system enables users to take on more "administrative" tasks as they prove themselves trustworthy. If you're allowing users to flag each other, you're already on this path. As for the details of the system (who can flag, unflag, and ban), I'd say you should look at various successful online communities (like StackOverflow) to see how they work, and how successful they are. In the end it will probably take some trial and error, since all communities differ.
If you want to write some code, you might create a script that looks for usage patterns typical of spammers (eg, same comment posted on multiple pages), though I think the goal should be to grow a community that does this for you. This may be more about planning than programming.
Some sophisticated spammers are happy to spend their time breaking your captcha if they feel that the reward is high enough. You should also consider looking at a spam server such as akismet for which there's a great rails plugin (https://github.com/joshfrench/rakismet).
There are other alternatives such as defensio (https://github.com/thewebfellas/defensio-ruby) as well as a gem that I found once which worked pretty well at detecting common blog spam, but I can't for the life of me find it any more.