Matching System Overhaul + Notification & Stability Fixes

🚀 Major Update — Smarter Matching

The matching system has been fully redesigned to improve profile discovery and eliminate empty feeds.

🔍 Matching System Overhaul

• Switched from strict filtering → intelligent ranking
• Only completed profiles are required
• Preferences, activity, department, and program now act as score boosts, not hard filters
• Uses feature vector cosine similarity as the primary ranking signal
• Shared interests and recent activity influence ranking
• Prevents profile exhaustion when the user base is small

Result:
More profiles shown, better recommendations, smoother discovery.

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🔔 Notification System Fixes

• Removed duplicate notification triggers

• Unified flow:

  Database row → Push notification

• Fixed cases where notifications failed to send

• Improved reliability for:

  • Messages
  • Matches
  • Likes
  • Cooldown resets

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💬 Messaging Improvements

• Fixed notification failures caused by database conflicts
• Stability improvements in chat-related triggers

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🖼 Profile Photo Handling

• Fixed issue where old photos reappeared after replacement
• Improved upload and refresh behavior

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⚙ Performance & Stability

• Reduced backend errors from duplicate constraints
• Cleaner database trigger structure
• Improved fallback logic in matching

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⬆ Upgrade Recommended

This release resolves key discovery and notification issues affecting user experience.