THE BACKGROUND

Over the past few weeks, there has been an increasing amount of discussion around claims that the Message Center is broken. We've even heard that these rumours have coined a new deviant type -- the silent deviant -- which apparantly means that although you have a deviantART account, nobody ever receives your comments, journals or deviations. Crazy talk!!

We realise that this is became a hot topic of discussion for many of you, and as the reports trickled into the help desk, we also saw journals and polls within the community increase on this subject.

When we receive a sufficient level of reports on a particular issue, we have a process in place where all the information collated is passed over to what we call our "Reactor Team", within deviousTechnology. This is a team who are tasked with responding to site issues and bugs, and this incident was assigned to the Reactor Team for investigation.

The Reactor team investigated the issue and around 2 weeks ago, we identified two main issues.

1. Deviants with more than 40,000 watchers were not getting messages sent out at all.

2. For Deviants with more than 4,000 watchers, a small proportion of those were not getting the message in their deviantwatch.

Both problems have since been fixed.We're sorry it happened in the first place, and apologise for any inconvenience which this may have caused.

Problem solved...or so you would think!

Then came some journals, and more polls. "Did you receive my deviation".. with many people simply hitting the "no" option. People were uploading, deleting and re-uploading again, and still this claim that the message centre was broken was continuing to spread through the community like a bad smell.

So once more, the testing and investigating begun. I'd like to take a few minutes to geek out with you over some stats which should reassure you once and for all, that there are no issues with the message centre.

DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR

No, this section isn't about the type of things that $randomduck gets up to on a Saturday night. It's about you and your message centre.

If you have 25 deviations in your devwatch, sorted alphabetically and you begin hitting the X button to delete them from your message centre - you may receive additional new deviations. This means, if you already cleared out one from `Artgerm and continued through your message centre, that by the time you get to `zemotion there may be another one from `Artgerm lurking around the corner.

If you post a poll asking people if they got your latest deviation, a large number of people will hit that "no" option purely for the hell of it. It is not a reliable source of identifying anything other than the number of people who like to select random options in polls.



THE FACTS


We have been monitoring 33 deviants for more than a week.

These 33 deviants have from 27 watchers all the way up to 31,294 watchers.

When anyone in this group submits a deviation, we kept a record of every single person being notified in their Message Center.

We ran an audit after every deviation submit, peeking into every watcher's Message Center to make sure they received the deviantWATCH message.

Of the 168,284 deviantWATCH messages sent out, we audited and verified 168,119 messages were in fact sitting in the watchers' Message Centers. That is 99.90% of the messages.

The audit takes 3-5 minutes to complete, after the deviation is submitted and the watchers notified. We believe the other 165 messages out of 168,284 messages had already been seen and deleted before the audit completed. That is a 0.0980% miss rate.

The lowest audited success rate of ANY deviation submission (from our test group) was 99.80%.

The above numbers do not include the deviation that `adonihs deleted before we had finished sending out the deviantWATCH messages.

Six - and only six - people commented on polls put up by any of the 33 deviants we are monitoring, saying they did not see the latest deviation in their Message Center. In every one of those six cases - EVERY one of those six cases - our audit found the deviantWATCH message in their message center.

6 credible reports out of 168,284 audited deviantWATCH messages is 0.00357%.

The various "did you get my latest deviation polls" generally show 20%-30% of the respondents saying No. Yet we only have 0.00357% credible reports, and 0.0000% of those credible reports appear to be valid.

Of the deviants being monitored - with a very wide range of watchers - we have absolutely verified that at least 99.90% of the deviantWATCH messages were received in the watchers' message centers.

The very lowest audited success rate is 99.80%. That is far different from the 20-30% failure rates reported by the polls.

Team Reactor did find and fix 2 definite problems. We know precisely what was wrong, and we know precisely what we fixed.


So there you have it. The Message Centre is working perfectly well!

If you ever experience any issues, or require assistance with your deviantART account, please contact the Help Desk. This is the only way we can guarantee you that your issues can be resolved with the most accurate and up to date information. Thank you to everyone who helped test out this issue, including many deviants, volunteers, Help Desk Staff and of course, Team Reactor.