Can't get notifications to clear today. On GETTR. That's the way things work. You have to do a hard refresh to make that happen. And you can't be using a VPN at the time, because GETTR responsiveness is so bad.
It would seem that, as expected, GETTR code is inherited. From some Oriental site. That explains a lot. And, as so common in situations like this, it's a case of someone taking over reasonably good code and then ruining it to pieces.
We still haven't much clue as to what 'metalanguage' they're using there, but it's gotta be a doozy.
We were warned by other users when first we ventured over. 'This is buggy', they told us. We didn't see many bugs in those first days. We did start noticing them after a while. Rather extraordinary gaffes. We posted about them.
Someone from GETTR support suggested we file official bug reports. Said and done. And the responses from GETTR staff are always cordial, to a fault. GETTR's about #1 in that regard.
The snag is that there's never any followup. Bugs are almost invariably not addressed. There's never any questions sent by those responsible for the code. Whoever they are. They don't seem particularly well educated either - in anything, from basic principles of programming to speaking the fucking English.
Here's a standard diagnostic new to GETTR. As one example.
'There are currently no notifications here at the moment'
That's it. Is that currently, or at the moment, or both? Shades of Richard Fish haunt. Or how about their arbitrary 777 byte count on posts? Was this chosen for some magic reason? Is this about sector alignment in secondary storage? Any reason at all? No, probably not. It was just picked at random and baked into everything.
Then the blinking stickers. They have 'stickers' today as many other sites, and as someone spent a lot of time making images of site founder Jason Miller. The trouble is that no one uses them. Because they're rather stupid. They're a fail, in other words. But no one will take them down. Users don't determine the trajectory of the GETTR site - ego does. So we have this obscene red BLINKING icon on every page instead.
That breaks all rules of ergonomics of course. Not that the dweebs at GETTR know anything about that. Remove Jason's toy? No.
The basic timeline is FUBAR as of several weeks back. They're using two algorithms for assembling timelines. Timelines seem to work on all other sites, but not here anymore. Things get really fucked up.
Then their emojis. Because emojis are real important. They're used more than stickers, but barely. Yet you gotta have emojis! And no matter that most client platforms today provide their own, GETTR's gotta have its own emojis!
But GETTR emojis are not compatible with standard Unicode emojis. They discovered this after a while. And their solution is to flag all incoming double-byte Unicode emojis, just remove them completely. You can use their tool to insert their own emojis, but not standard Unicode emojis.
The GETTR emoji tool was designed by a nutter. It's oblong, higher than wider. So you'll often find that you can't see the entire tool onscreen. And the tool can't be moved around. The topmost row is for one character only. So you could accommodate more if you put that character on another line. But no.
A new treat: there's a filmy 'flap' that comes up out of nowhere at times, for no apparent reason, and hides the 'Post' button, so you can't post anything. A occasional workaround is to scroll up and down a bit - the flap will temporarily disappear if you're lucky.
Follows and followers. It no longer works properly. These attributes should be core data, but evidently they're not. They keep disappearing all the time, and users have to remind them to go back and fix the code.
Then too, GETTR likes to boast of how many Twitter followers people have, except they don't have a mechanism for keeping this data current.
Part of the damage encountered only within the past fortnight is the site's inability to fully update pages. We've seen several times how switching to a new page carries along posts from a previous page. The workaround will of course be to effect a hard refresh - but again this won't work through a VPN.
Did you know that tags are always lower case? Someone at GETTR thinks so. So if you use Camel Case to make your tags easier to read, you'll find GETTR helpfully switching everything to lower case for you. Isn't that great?
'No post data yet!' That's a great one. You've got tens of thousands of posts in your timeline, but GETTR tells you, time and again, you've got none. Switch to your personal account feed, of course, and they're there, but something is seriously wrong with the GETTR code and there's little hope they'll ever know how to fix it.
Perhaps you encounter an unpleasant user? Perhaps you block - or, more intelligently, just mute. And after a while you think better of it and want to unmute. Good luck. Going back several months now, those lists are inaccessible. They're probably accessible on the platform of choice for GETTR staff, but when they're not accessible on the world's most popular web browser, you have a serious issue.
Or let's talk URL shorteners. Almost all platforms have figured out how they work. Not GETTR. Shorteners can be embedded. This is totally over the heads of GETTR staff.
A new one is that when you're quoting a previous post, and include an attachment in your post, your attachment disappears when you finally post.
They've messed with their search algorithm as well. What previously worked no longer works.
The composition field is a mine field. There's so much going on and there shouldn't be. You almost always get a free space character tossed in. Gee thanks. And editing's a mess.
The composition field itself? It's REUSED. It doesn't even clear the undo/redo buffer. Have fun.
And Happy Xmas, said GETTR! Bringing you a mobo-melting snowfall graphic that could not be turned off. The workaround was to switch to your personal page. They'd had Mama Turkey and her kiddies for Thanksgiving, but that was cute and could be defeated by clicking on all the fowl. No such luck here.
Jason jets around the globe, making new deals with new countries, and he's proud of his success, but he has NFC what's going on under the bonnet at GETTR. Odds are the site will only get worse.