Can’t believe. Only just had a notification that a favourited sit had come up & it’s already closed & reviewing applications. Very annoying.
Unfortunately it happens all the time for popular listings.
I preferred it when homeowners could pause listings at any time rather than have the THS system pause it for them at five applications.
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There must be a delay/lag in getting notifications? There is no way within 1 minute 5 people applied.
Yes it seems to be quite common and I got the same just this morning. It’s been discussed a lot on the forum
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I am pretty sure not everyone gets alerts at exactly the same time.
Sitters are in different time zones and I have seen listings disappear before I have even finished reading the details.
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This link may also provide further information
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The alerts are almost certainly run via a scheduled chron job that triggers at specific time(s) throughout the day and does a bulk message push for all notifications that have popped since the last push. My guess is that this is legacy code that predates when they started auto-closing listings. Immediate alerts are possible but would likely require updating several points of logic touching multiple areas of the app so is probably too heavy a lift to justify when weighed against other, more urgent, improvements. I manage software development projects and while I would have this in my backlog as an issue to tackle at some point, it would be low on the list until something more urgent arose that it could feasibly be tied to to kill multiple birds with one deploy.
TL:DR: it sucks but, unfortunately, I wouldn’t hold your breath that it will change any time soon.
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I have favorited sits in a very pop. location. I need to push the notification button within a minute or so to be able to apply. If I do that I am able to press dates and apply-button every time. For the location I am not at all surprised that five people will press the button within a minute or two. There must be thousands waiting for a sit.
We also know from forum that many will ask a question or otherwise «hold» the application. Although a high demand location I have seen several times that they relist shortly after. It could be sitters that are not actually interested in the specific dates but have just asked something and/ or applicants are declined. So a sit could re-emerge for the same dates shortly after.
THS probably sends out push notifications when the sit already has rached “reviewing”-status.
This is annoying sitters. It is disappointing them every time they click. Many switch off those notifications completely because of this.
If I were THS management, I would tell tech that it was a priority to stop such notifications from going out.
After all, this is a 100 million GBP company, that is completely reliant on internet user interfaces.
For fast to fill locations, I’m certain that they’re full before the chron job runs and that there is no functionality in place to eliminate alerts for listings that are in review status. Yes, it is a needed improvement. But I doubt it’s high on their list of things to do.