Chat sounds only working sometimes...intermittently or not at all?

[jordan-violet]

We’re currently working on an initiative to help other teams in our business to build out their community experiences within our community. To prepare for that, as a forcing function, I’m having my team move all of our operations to Discourse:

Why you should use Discourse internally for your company/team instead of Slack (4 years use case)

We have been using Discourse as the main tool for communication, record keeping, research documenting, lab journaling tool for over 4 years. I will argue that most companies would greatly benefit from having Discourse as their main communication tool rather than Slack & email chains & WhatsApp. It boils down to this: If you believe there is any value in the conversations between employees for future reflection then you need Discourse. The simple reason is that channel based instant messaging …

My entire team (7-8 people) are having issues with chat notification sounds. Different browsers, sound is enabled in browsers, notification sound enabled in our user settings. Every once in a while I’ll randomly hear a sound, but maybe like 1 in 20+ messages. My team are not hearing any sounds at all, both on direct chat messages and channel chat messages.

Any ideas what we might be missing?

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

Are you on chrome? mac/windows?

[jordan-violet]

Chrome, windows

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

No immediate solution, but I will try to dig this next week.

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

I pushed two commits on these subjects:

FIX: improves chat audio notification reliability (#27089)

FIX: play audio sound on message in non group DMs (#27112)

I expect it will largely improve the situation, will monitor this tomorrow.

[jordan-violet]

Thanks so much! We’re using it full-time every day as a team, so when we’re back online tomorrow we’ll see how it’s going.

[jordan-violet]

I heard a notification today on a direct chat, without having to be tagged…but only once. After that, I didn’t receive notifications after receiving messages. I do still receive them though, if someone tags my name in their message.

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

There are various reasons which could cause this:

• you have been interacting with the tab less than 10 seconds ago
• you are on the channel itself

[jordan-violet]

Would it be possible to have a configuration where you are always notified unless you are actively in that channel/chat and actively selected into it?

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

@jordan-violet

actively selected into it

Can you clarify what that means please?

Im not sure we want to introduce a setting for this, but maybe @lindsey? (the setting would be how much time do you have to be idle before we start sending notification sound, or maybe we just remove this idle time?)

[jordan-violet]

Well I think the issue is that you’re making an assumption about when we as users would want to be notified.

Any chat application I’ve ever used, if I’m not active in that chat immediately, I get notified.

We’re currently trying to utilize chat for our team, and we’re consistently missing notifications and everyone forgets to check chat (because they didn’t hear a notification).

This is definitely a need for us to be able to consider chat—we need to know that we can be notified consistently (including if we aren’t immediately active in chat). So if you don’t want to set that as a global setting (which is understandable), we’d at least need the ability to configure that as an admin.

The chat experience has been…tough. But we’ve been trying to commit to using it so we can understand the gaps and report them, in hopes to see it improve.

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

@jordan-violet

But we’ve been trying to commit to using it so we can understand the gaps and report them, in hopes to see it improve.

I have made 4 changes on notifications alone this week, so I’m definitely following this and trying to improve it.

[jordan-violet]

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

So I will experiment with 0 seconds idle time on chat, will push this tomorrow, we will see if that’s an improvement for you.

[lindsey (Lindsey Fogle)]

@jordan-violet

The chat experience has been…tough. But we’ve been trying to commit to using it so we can understand the gaps and report them, in hopes to see it improve.

Thanks for sticking with it! We are committed to improving notifications and your reports here are so helpful to us on that journey.

[jordan-violet]

The only way I can expect to make it work for my community, is to make it work for my team first! So we’re committed to just that!

[davidb]

I made an update on this last week which should mean that sounds are working again more frequently in the browser:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/de08ce8f7b2d446511f12adee3b0f5495d37cf42

I still plan to make some enhancements around chat sounds. I think only having chat sounds when there is badge (green/blue dot) on the chat icon would be an improvement, as currently chat attempts to play sounds any time a new message is posted in channels or DMs you are in.

[lindsey (Lindsey Fogle)]

Hey @jordan-violet, are you still experiencing issues with chat sounds? I’m curious if @davidb’s fixes resolved the sound inconsistencies or if there are still lingering issues there.