Removing/uploading burgee triggers unnecessary updates

[openwebsolns]

Background

On 2024-03-24, a user removed a burgee from a school; then added a new one. Each of those actions resulted, as expected, in an update request for every regatta that the school had participated in.

Problem

The regatta update type used, ACTIVITY_DETAILS, caused more cascading updates than are necessary. For example, it triggered updates to every school that participated in that regatta. As a result, the simple and sanctioned task of removing a burgee from one school resulted in (basically) the entire public website being regenerated. This also led to a glut of regatta updates blocking the update queue, leading to a slower updates on newer regattas.

Opportunities for improvement

Use an appropriate update activity

Using ACTIVITY_TEAM instead would eliminate unnecessary cascading updates. Indeed, changing a burgee is the same as changing a team's name, for example. This is the correct update activity.

Steer users to the replacement function

Instead of deleting and adding a new burgee, remind users that replacing the burgee is an option. For this particular use case, it would have eliminated many unnecessary updates. This is a "nice to have", as it doesn't address the legitimate use cases of adding a burgee where once there was none (or vice versa).

Introduce a low priority queue

Changes to old regattas have less priority than updates to "active" regattas. Pushing updates to a lower priority queue would allow these large number of backfills not to block ongoing updates. This is a significant scope of work.

Seed every school with an empty burgee?

Potentially, we could create an empty burgee for every school, whether a literal transparent image, or a placeholder burgee (similar to placeholder avatars in other online forums). That way, changing a burgee would never require every regatta to be updated in the first place, and would behave like a burgee replacement, instead.