REQ: Feed improvements [Search & stability]

[Drakinite]

Hello,
I have two requests to improve the usability of the Feed section: The first of which would be a very helpful new feature, and the second of which would improve the appearance of stability.

1. Filtering filenames: Filtering based on action type is useful, but I still find it very tedious to search for specific file/folder activity. If I have a particular file or folder for which I want to view the edit history, for example if I suspect Insync accidentally overwrote something, it’s very inconvenient to scroll through the list to search for that particular file or files in that particular folder. I would greatly appreciate the ability to type in the top bar and filter the results of the feed to match the string I typed. No need for globs or regexes if that makes it more difficult; Just being able to match a string (with or without case sensitivity) would be wonderful.
2. "4 years ago": This is an annoying element of the feed which I assume is a glitch. As I scroll down, I often see files/folders on the bottom last edited several months or years ago, which appear for a few frames before the more recent files appear in the list. It would be nice if these could be hidden. I don’t know how the feed works under the hood, but it seems to me like the list of updates aren’t sorted before they are shown to the script that displays them.
   
   

[mia]

Thanks very much for raising these points, @Drakinite! I have forwarded this to our Product Team and have also reached out to the engineer in charge regarding the second point.

[nop_head]

+1 for fixing the second point. It is very confusing and disconcerting that it skips tens of thousands of recent changes and shows random events from months and years ago. I should never see those unless I scroll back past thousands of recent events because I change dozens of files multiple times most days.

[mia]

Hi @nop_head and @Drakinite!

As per our engineer:

Insync checks and generates activities by comparing the file resource we received from the cloud to the file properties (name, size, timestamps) saved in our database. There are cases where the cloud sends us a file resource that are from years back (maybe triggered by the user browsing it in the app or in the web), and since we don’t have that file saved in our db, the app considers it as an upload/added activity and generates an item in our Feed.

I hope this gives a bit more info. Feel free to reply should you have any other questions or concerns about the second point!

[nop_head]

In my case these are files I change many times a day. So yes they were modified minutes ago, hours ago, days ago, months ago and years ago. I don’t browse them in the app or the web. They are a database.

I think what it is doing is showing the last few changes but then for each of those files it adds when they were first uploaded, which was years ago. So the log is a mixture of recent history and ancient history. If I scroll down it adds more recent history to the top and more ancient history at the bottom.

As I scroll I down I see the same event over and over again because it keeps adding new stuff in front of it and pushing it ever lower. For example, one of the first uploads was 7 years ago. When I scroll down to that it shows at the bottom of the log but when I scroll a few lines more, instead of it moving up the screen it jumps back to middle of the four year old changes and I can scroll down to the 7 year change over and over again.

Now I understand what it is doing, it is less of problem but it is very confusing presentation, and not the way a scrolling log should work. It shouldn’t show the original upload events until it has shown all the more recent events first.

[Drakinite]

Thanks for the info & providing an explanation for why it’s occurring. I still agree with nop_head, however, that this really shouldn’t happen; and I’d appreciate it if they can figure out a way to avoid that behavior.

[mia]

Great points raised, @nop_head and @Drakinite! I will coordinate with our Product Manager and engineers to see how we can approach this case and line up a possible improvement.

I appreciate you both for your time and patience!