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spyed — Message Center Retention Changes
Published: 2009-04-18 02:48:22 +0000 UTC; Views: 7017; Favourites: 1258; Downloads: 0
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Description
For many deviants, the Message Center acts as a home base for their deviantART experience.
It allows you to view the latest deviations from your friends, find out about contests and events, stay up to date by reading journals, vote in polls, and read comments and replies. In essence, your Message Center is the heart of deviantART with information constantly being pumped in and out.
In order to create a superior Message Center experience and add much needed functionality, we've found it necessary to implement a few limitations on the messages and deviations in your Message Center.
These limitations come in two forms:
Time
If a message is older than one year and has not been moved to a custom folder the message will expire and automatically be removed from your Message Center. Time expiration only applies to the Inbox, not to custom folders. Anything moved to custom folders will be saved, no matter how old the items might be. (For more information about custom folders, visit the FAQ .)
10,000 per folder
There is a 10,000 messages per folder limit. This means that folders like news, deviations, etc., can only hold 10,000 messages each. 10,000 messages in each and every folder.
A note about notes
Although it may appear as if notes are a part of the Message Center, the notes system is actually a separate piece of technology. This means that notes are not affected by the above limitations; however, it also means they aren't part of the upgrades to come in the near future.
The Benefits
The benefits of these changes will lead to better sifting and sorting options. Imagine being able to sort by people who are your friends first, or the ability to display threading (comments to just your journal, or just your deviation; no more mish-mash!). This is the sort of Message Center nirvana we want to bring to you!
To realize this goal, we need to implement these changes quickly. Again, these changes will affect those who have an excess of 10,000 messages per folder or have messages outside of custom folders that are older than one year.
Grace Period
There is a two-week grace period for members to move messages they wish to save into custom folders. On May 1st, 2009 any messages exceeding the above limits and not moved to custom folders will be deleted.
We apologize for the short notice, but it's imperative to make these changes now so the additional functionality you've been craving can be achieved in a swift manner.
Stay devious.
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Comments: 2775
Ooooh, that's great 
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A button to edit comments you previously made would be nice. xD
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Good idea, but I just read this, so I missed the dealine by 24 hours. Is there any way to restore the messages I thought I had saved by not deleting them? 4 years of messages which I had thought I saved have now been lost.
Is there anything I can do?
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I wonder if it would be possible to include a feature whereby you could save a draft of a comment so that you could have further chance to develop it and complete your thought... I know that that would come when I don't have time to finish a comment but have a good train of thought going for it...
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GREAT! I just lost a shit ton of messages I haven't gotten to check because Im not on much. my friend updates this for me.
oh well i guess
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Ah. So that explains the sudden drop in my message count.
I don't have much replies received and don't really need the sorting options anyway. This is fine by me, though.
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Great! This message just appeared today. Coincidentally, I had stuff get deleted at the same time. Nice.
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Ah, well, it's good to know I'm not the only person who apparently did that totally wrong. I put some old comments in a special place and they apparently resorted to cannibalism, with the survivors eventually killing themselves out of shame.
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Ok, maybe I'm a little late in this topic, but something "funny" happened... I read the new policy and very diligently created a "Main folder" for my messages. Moved all of them in the new folder and everything looked ok.
Then yesterday I looked at the folder and... uh oh, zero messages there! Is this just an access problem, or have I lost all of my old messages?
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Check again, it should be fixed.
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All posts and topics that I moved to personal folders (not lose) were deleted!
Thank you very much, this is not really fun!
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Same with me, looks like it's "reverse month" so when you get an "upgrade" you obtain "limitations", and when you "keep safe" your data you "throw it down the drain"... funny
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hm, when I placed a newer comment in there, it didn't show up as well
so hopefully that means that the messages are merely not displayed.
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It should be fixed now, mine have started to display again. :3
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It does so for me, too,
but in return,
I haven't gotten any new posts showing up in the "comments" tab in the last three weeks.
It works for the "replies"-tab, though.
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Tried reporting it as a bug to the helpdesk? I didn't see that in the topics on [link]
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Hm.
No, I didn't, I was just assuming that this was a common problem that I assumed would have been reported by hundreds of people before, not requiring the people working on the update to bother with for the 20.000.000th time.
But if you're saying that the problem is relatively unique, maybe I should ask them.
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Well, I'm not staff.. so I can't really know any more then you do here.
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...
Turns out that all this time, I had the option 'oldest first' enabled. >_<####
So, technically, I was viewing it "upside down", OF COURSE I didn't see any new comments.
Gladly I just realized that mere moments before I was going to submit a help desk inquiry... god this would have been stupid...
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oh well, at least you found out the problem in the end. ^^
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:iconImreallystupidplz:
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1) 2 weeks is awfully short notice. Many folks don't check in more than once a month.
2) FIRE THAT WRITER: "In order to create a superior Message Center experience and add much needed functionality, we’ve found it necessary to implement a few limitations on..."
Good grief. Did you hire a yuppie marketing weenie specifically to write tired yuppie-isms like "create a superior ... experience" and use tired buzzwords like "functionality" and "implement"? Tell that writer to pack up his empty starbucks cups, take a "writing for real people" course, and go find other employment.
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Ouch. Try to have a bit more foresight next time, please; some people may not be active that often. Or might be moving, or otherwise unable to access a computer within such a short time period.
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Those who have over 10000 laying around might not have logged in since quite a while. Expecting them to find this article is absurd. 2 weeks is nothing.
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Thank you!!!
I was on hiatus for a while and worried that when I came back I would have a ridiculous amount of messages to check/delete. Brilliant.
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So when you move comments it just deletes them all... GOOD JOB! This is not a good way to start this system. >_<
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dw. It's just a glitch. ...at least... according to the dA status forum it is..
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Ah if I reload they show back up... you might want to fix that.
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I hoped it was just a glitch in the rendering of the page, it's very annoying though... Also this is not the first strange behavior on DA: many times when i click "next" on a gallery it updates the URL but not the actual content of the page...
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Oh god yeah, I like the "sort by artist" view on deviations but if you have more then a few hundred it starts to do REALLY weird things. Like excluding older submissions until you delete enough that new ones from artists you've cleared suddenly show up. Sort of frustrating. =/
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Oh yeah, thanks to this, ALL OF MY TREASURED COMMENTS IN MY FOLDERS HAVE BEEN DELETED.
What a genius system dA.
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you just have to reload the page apparently. Dw. It's not deleted... it's just a little glitch. dA will get around to fixing it soon...
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I moved the deviations from my friends into my folder but all it did was deleted. What Happened?
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you have to reload the page... apparently...
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