Which half of this page did you come for?
This is the comment system. Not a picture of it. If you are signed in you can post here and upvote what other people wrote. Sorting is fixed: most upvotes first, then oldest. There is no threading, no editing, and no delete. Every comment on Slatesource lives inside a Thread chip like this one, which means comments are something an author opts into by placing a chip, not something bolted onto the bottom of every page.
Four Things at Four Different Stages
Reactions, comments, follows and notifications get described together as a social layer, which flatters three of them. They were built years apart, they have very different amounts of finish, and pretending otherwise would make this page useless as a reference. So: in order, best first.
Reaction types
5
Reactions one person can leave on one chip
all 5
Comment length limit
1000
Notification types declared
5
Notification types ever produced
3
Reactions Attach to Chips
Love, Applause, Fire, Insight, On point. They land on a single chip rather than the page, so a slate with twelve chips has twelve independent reaction bars and the shape of the response tells you which part landed. The bar is hidden entirely at zero and while editing, so an empty page stays quiet instead of showing five grey zeroes.
Not a Radio Button
The uniqueness constraint is on the triple of chip, user and reaction type, not the pair. One person can leave all five on the same chip. That was a choice: a reaction here is a note about what the chip is, not a single vote, and something can be both funny and useful.
@Table(
name = "chip_reactions",
uniqueConstraints =
@UniqueConstraint(columnNames = {"chip_id", "user_id", "reaction_type"}))
Nothing Is Counted Twice
There is no counter column anywhere. Totals are grouped on read, and a whole page of reactions comes back in one query rather than one per chip. It costs a little at read time and it means the number is never wrong, which for a feature nobody audits is the better trade.
They Survive a Republish
This is the part worth stealing. When a slate is pushed again from a repository the chips are rebuilt from scratch, which would normally orphan every reaction. Instead, old and new chips are matched by their row and position in the grid and the reactions are re-pointed. Edit a typo on a chip that thirty people reacted to and the thirty stay. Building that was slower than not building it, and it is the difference between a feature people trust and one they learn to avoid.
Follows Follow Slates
There is no user-to-user follow anywhere in the codebase. You follow a slate, which suits a platform where the thing worth tracking is a project rather than a person. The endpoints work. The follow and unfollow hooks on the front end are fully written and have zero call sites, so there is no button to press. The feed that would list what you follow is one repository method that nothing calls.
Notifications Are Half a Loop
Three events write a notification: someone follows your slate, you get invited to one, you get a message. Reactions and comments write nothing, though the enum has values for both. The seen timestamp exists on the record and is never set by any code, so the unread count only ever goes up. The screen that would render them expects a title and a body the server does not send, and it is not imported by anything, so it has never been on screen. Written path partly alive, read path not built.
Where the four stand today
Reactions: shipped and in use
Reactions survive a republish
Comments: post and upvote
Comments: edit delete or report
Follows: endpoints live
Follows: a button anywhere
Notifications: written on follow invite and message
Notifications: marked as read
Notifications: shown to anyone
Why Publish the Gaps
Because the alternative is a page that reads like a feature list and teaches nothing. The interesting content in a social layer is not that it has reactions. It is that reactions were built to survive a rebuild and notifications were not finished, and that both of those are true at the same time in a product that ships.
"Three of these are features. One is an enum with good intentions.
"