As a fan of bookmark reminders, I’d like to suggest an additional feature I think will be quite useful.
A common use of reminders is to do follow ups. The problem when they are used that way is that, if someone answers to that post, you will:
Receive a notification for the new message. You usually want to act on that, answering back.
Receive another notification some time later for the follow up. This is unnecessary and clutters your notifications.
Email managers like Gmail or Front solve this by automatically dismissing the reminder when a new email is received. This is the default and can’t be changed.
In Discourse, follow-ups are not going to be the only use of reminders, so I have two suggestions:
Add it as an opt-in option when you set the reminder with a checkbox in the modal window to “Dismiss reminder when new answer is received”.
Add a “Dismiss reminder” button easily accessible at the bottom of the post. This is very important because the in order to avoid a cumbersome workflow the button must be in the thread page, next to the new answer dialog. If the workflow to dismiss the reminder is to going to another page, searching for it, selecting options and finally deleting it, it won’t be useful for this usage.
Sorry, I am not following what you have written? What exactly are you proposing? I don’t understand. Reminders go away when… someone replies to your post? I am very very confused.
Yes, that’s it, because you already received a new notification for that post.
Imagine this case:
Day 1:
Someone asks a question.
You answer it.
Then you set a reminder for next week to do a follow-up.
Day 3:
The person answers back.
You are watching the post so you receive a notification.
You answer back. Everything is fine, so there’s no need for another follow-up.
Day 7:
You receive the (useless) reminder to do the follow up.
This obviously needs to be an opt-in option because that’s not the only use reminders will have in Discourse. But reminders for follow ups are a very common workflow.
Another option would be to add a button to dismiss the reminder next to the new answer dialog, so the reminder is easy to dismiss once you answer back.
But is this functionality even included in the new feature as currently written? Are you suggesting to add “auto-dismiss” functionality? Because I don’t see it anywhere.
As someone who isn’t managing a forum or anything like that, I certainly wouldn’t need or want my reminders to be auto-dismissed.
I am really sorry for not explaining this feature well enough. Totally my fault.
The truth is that Gmail always auto-dismiss the reminder when it receives a new reply. That is not optional, it is the only way Gmail works!
The same example in Gmail works fine:
Day 1:
Someone asks you a question.
You answer it.
Then you set a reminder (called snooze in Gmail) for next week to do a follow-up.
Day 3:
The person replies.
The email appears in your inbox, so you receive a notification.
You answer back. Everything is fine, so there’s no need for another follow-up.
Day 7:
You don’t receive the reminder to do the follow-up.
Every help desk software also works like this, because follow-ups are an integral part of support.
I am suggesting this feature because the very same follow-up workflow is applicable to Discourse. Many companies (like Auth0, Cloudflare, Twitter, Ionic, Netlify, Bitnami…) have support forums where people answers questions.
And even if people are not using a forum for support, it is still a very useful feature to have when someone answers an important topic and they want to make sure they get an answer back, so they set up a reminder to do a follow-up on that.
By the way, this is not something that just popped into my head, this is something we’ve been waiting for since we started using Discourse. I am very grateful Discourse is finally having reminders
Thanks for taking the time to explain this. If we did this I think this would have to be an option in the modal like “Cancel reminder on direct reply” that would only show up if you were bookmarking one of your own posts with a reminder. I guess this could be even further scoped by saying who you want to be the user/group that cancels the reminder if they reply? Just throwing out ideas.
@HAWK would this be a useful feature for you or your team? I have noticed you following up quiet customers at certain times in the inbox. Would it be helpful if they reply first your reminder gets cancelled (optionally)?
I am not against possibly fiddling with this, but let’s slot this very much into v2 or v3.
I would like us to live with the current implementation for about 1 month before layering any more features here. (including my remind me when I am back at the desktop idea which I am quickly abandoning since I simply do not need it)
I get that notification fatigue can be a problem, but let people live with the current implementation for a while prior to adding any new complex features that take quite a while to explain.
We are fundamentally not email. We do not have an “inbox” when it comes to topics on the forum.
What when people reply to the topic but do not do a direct reply
What if it is a quote on another topic
What if the user is not even tracking the topic the user set a reminder for
There are so many ways I can think of where the system would throw away a reminder that you really wanted to get, incorrectly.
Fundamentally, a direct reply is a “blue notification” it is significantly weaker than a “green” bookmark reminder.
Let’s polish and live with what we got first and see some real extreme pain and need for this new curve ball, prior to adding it.
How would that look with bookmarks made at the post level, rather than topic? If there were several users in the same topic who needed follow-up would there be a big cancel reminder button below every bookmarked post?
The nice thing about the new feature is how unobtrusive it is in use. The one thing I don’t need is more buttons.
