Hey hey Alex,
Thanks for putting this together. As we’ve chatted about in the past, the Dash is never really a reliable number for the number of items that a user is going to get each time they fire up a certain tool; it’s just not that simple a “report”, because of the factors involved in how the queues and tools work. The Dash number is a good ballpark for what’s left in the queue, but the Dash saying 5 for a particular tool doesn’t mean you’ll get exactly 5 more items when you load up the tool.
There are lots of reasons for this. For example, most of the tools register your skips and try not to show you the same item again, at least for several days, so there might be one in the queue that you’re not going to see again because you’ve skipped it. Also, in many of the tools, when you get one of the items served up to you, that ‘checks it out’ of the queue for a set period of time (to help avoid edit clashing), so if someone else tries to get to the remaining few items during that period, it might tell them there are none left (if you don’t make a decision on the item when it’s checked out to you, it’ll go back into the queue later on). Furthermore, the “that’s all we have” message will pop up if the tool isn’t able to pull up a new item right at that time (for example, if the current load on the tool is too high or there’s some error in displaying the item for you). There are also some tools where you won’t see all of the items because your own edits are involved (like RCP). So… it’s complicated
- and while the Dash numbers can be handy, I wouldn’t rely on them to tell you what you’re going to see in the tool, down to the number - it just doesn’t work that way.
On the Tips Patrol one, there could be an error in the one of the remaining tips or something, but I don’t think so, since it doesn’t seem to be at 5 anymore, as it was when you wrote - it just said 2 for me, and I got 2 tips to act on. Now it says 1 and I’m getting the “that’s all we have” message, but that 1 tip could be checked out to someone else, or I might have skipped it in the past. It does seem to be moving up and down, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it matching up perfectly - see all the reasons above why that’s unlikely to happen, and rest assured that the tool is doing its job to avoid overload and edit clashes
On the NAB front, I checked several times yesterday and this morning. It more often than not was matching up for me. But as you know, the Dash doesn’t update as regularly as you’d like; it’s not real time data, so it will likely include numbers for recently promoted/demoted articles for a while afterwards. I also think it may include new articles that have been written but haven’t yet shown up in NAB (that usually takes about an hour but can occasionally take six or so). Again, when you include items that have recently left the queue and ones that are going into it soon, the number is close, but it’s not always going to be perfect.
As it happens, I was talking to our engineer Jordan about this recently - we were thinking that in the long run, if this Dash behavior is confusing, it might be better to avoid numbers altogether and move to general indicators of how long the queues are - for example, to match the ‘weather’ in each one. Perhaps threshold-based terms like “Plenty more” or “Only a few” would be easier to process and less confusing than the remaining numbers in the queue, which aren’t always an indicator of what you’ll actually see in the tool. Our engineers have their hands pretty full right now, but if a lot of folks find the Dash numbers offputting, then when there’s more time to work on this, that might be the best solution to avoid confusion!
