What are nouserevents for?

Question

See table qa_userfavorites > Field "nouserevents".

I have checked all code, nowhere is an explanation what "nouser" is.

Maybe I am missing a vocabulary here since I'm not English mothertongue?

@Scott: Please add an explanation to the code, what is it - in case you know. Maybe just gidgreen knows...

 

See files:

- qa-db-events.php
- qa-db-favorites.php
- qa-db-install.php
- qa-db-selects.php

 

I only see in qa-db-install.php the short comment:

'nouserevents' => 'TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL', // do we skip writing events to the user stream?

Is this it?

Answer 1

It's all to do with "shared events". The qa_favorites table stores which users have favourited which things (entities). If lots of people have favourited the same entity (e.g. this question) then instead of storing events (e.g. new answers on the question) for every user who favourited it, it stores it once in the sharedevents table.

So, if qa_favorites.nouserevents=1 it means the events for that entity are stored in qa_sharedevents, otherwise they are stored in qa_userevents.

There is more explanation about this in the big comment in qa-db-favorites.php.

Comments

thanks a lot for the valuable information . :)

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until today i haven't used the core shared events, nor my users in their "updates" page etc. From the beginning I was using Noah's history plugin to write events into the eventlogger table. Maybe we should think about this for the future. I have the feeling that it could simplify the entire mechanism.

Maybe I am wrong, then the entire activity / update page must be changed. As I once wrote, bring the activity into focus (big, visible) not the question title. http://www.question2answer.org/qa/updates