Overview

This article aims to help when:

• Customer wants to be sure that activity up to 180 days old shows in their news streams.
• You are confused about the difference between lookback_days properties and streamPeriodDays DB setting.

Prerequisites

These steps can be executed by the customer in On-Prem instances. But in Cloud and Hosted instances, they can only be executed by support.

Information

To summarize, streamPeriodDays controls how long the EAE service holds on to posts. If there is recent activity then the lookback days properties control a moving window of activity that users actually see. The lookback days don’t affect the age of items showing in the notifications inbox.

Let’s test this with a hypothetical scenario where: 

• The jive.news.default_results_unread_item_lookback_days is set to 10 days (or the value is not set at all).
• The jive.news.default_results_read_item_lookback_days is set to 2 days (or the value is not set at all).
• The streamPeriodDays is set to 180 days (or the value is not set at all).
• There has been no activity for 1 month.
• There have been 4 discussion posts 1 month, 1 month, 3 months, and 4 months ago.

In this scenario, the end-user will see the 4 discussion posts in their news stream. They will also see notifications about these posts in their notifications inbox.

Now if we set lookback days as below explicitly:

• jive.news.default_results_unread_item_lookback_days = 10 
• jive.news.default_results_read_item_lookback_days = 2 

And if we change the streamPeriodDays to 30.

The 2 older posts (3 and 4 months old) will disappear from the user’s news stream. Only the 1-month-old items are visible.

Same for notifications inbox:

Now if there is a new post created today, and the user logs in today and sees the post.

• The 2 older posts (1-month-old) will also disappear from the user’s news stream.
• The new post (which is seen - or “read”) will remain in the user’s stream for 2 days
• The 1-month-old posts and 1 new post will remain in the user’s notifications inbox for 30 days.

Let’s say a different user logs in after 5 days. This user will also see the new post because the “unread items” look back is set to 10 days.

Now if you change the read items lookback to 30 days, the 1-month-old post will reappear in the news stream.