Bug with chat notifications not showing up

My team of 7 employees are attempting to use chat for our everyday communication, but experiencing two major bugs that all of us are experiencing equally (windows and mac, multiple types of browsers):

No chat notifications at all

Every once in a while, I will see on my iPad across the room that I have a Discourse notification of a chat, but my desktop doesn’t display anything. I am thinking I only see this with responses in threads.

We also have a similar bug reported with no chat sounds:

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Hey @sp-jordan-violet! Couple questions:

  • How are you accessing Discourse from your iPad? (e.g., Hub, PWA)

  • Can you tell me about what you’re doing in Discourse on your desktop when this happens? I’m specifically wondering if you are active in chat (even if not in the thread in question) when this happens.

  • Can you tell me about your notification setup for each device? A screenshot of the Preferences > Notifications and Preferences > Chat tabs from each device would work well if you don’t mind sharing (feel free to PM those to me if you’d prefer).

We’ve seen issues around notifications not firing as expected before, so I know they can be really tricky to reproduce. This information will help me test this out myself and hopefully together we can start to narrow things down a bit so we can fix this up for you and your team. Thanks in advance for your help!

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Discourse Hub

Gosh, it’s hard to say because I’m just flying about my work, you know? Sometimes I’m in Slack (at work), sometimes I’m in that browser tab, sometimes another tab in that same window, sometimes in another browser window. Just flying about those options constantly. I’ll do my best to try to recognize today, if possible.


I also just had it happen. Here’s the setup:

  • I got a chat notification in a channel, in a thread
  • I received the notification on mobile, but not on desktop (not even the little blue dot)
  • My desktop state was:
    • Discourse was open in only one tab (chrome), shared with another tab (this tab was the active tab)
    • That window was minimized

I hope this helps!

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I was also troubleshooting issues around desktop notifications and if memory serves: if someone DMs you, there is a notification but if they @ you in a regular channel there is no notification.

I think in general the channels don’t seem to generate notifications but the DMs do.

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Did you enable notifications for everything in the channel’s settings?

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Thanks for these steps, this was super helpful.

I think I have found the problem — it looks like we are not correctly generating an activity indicator in the header (the little blue dot) for non-mention replies in a followed thread. The mobile push notifications still work (which is why you’re seeing those on the iPad). When I tested this, I could get the push notification on mobile, but when I opened Discourse on mobile without going through the notification, the activity indicator wasn’t showing on the header there, either.

I’m asking our team to look into this and get it fixed up.

In the meantime, would you please let me know if you discover other situations where this happens (i.e. not just related to non-mention activity in threads)?

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Absolutely we will!

No notification under these conditions:

  • on mobile (no desktop instances are active)
  • received mobile notification (iOS) of a response in thread
  • clicked on the notification to go into Discourse Hub
  • no blue dot

Finally had a chance to test this out again. For desktop notifications:

Good:

  • mentions (aka @'ing someone) will always trigger a desktop notification

Not so Good:

  • DMs do NOT trigger a desktop notification (but would expect them to)
  • When Desktop notifications for a channel is set to “For All Activity” you don’t get a notification

Are these working for other people?

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These are not working for other people. I’ve required my whole team to go “all in” on Discourse chat so we can get a better feel for what works and what doesn’t.

These notifications have been a universal problem, for sure.

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@sp-jordan-violet We’ve deployed an update today that should fix this issue:

Could you please keep an eye out and let us know if you notice that again?

I will look into both of these and update you here once I know more!

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You all are awesome! We’ll definitely keep them coming :smiley:

Another quick question… we’re planning to implement mobile push notifications in our app soon and ahead of that I wanted to test out that functionality in discourse hub.

I just tested it out and am not able to get any push notifications in there, not even for mentions (@s). Are push notifications working for anyone in discourse hub?

I’m on an iphone and have “Allow Notifications” set for the discourse hub app.

Thanks

Did you try with a forum that is hosted by Discourse?

‎Discourse Hub on the App Store :
The application provides:

  • A central spot to view all notifications, unread counts and new counts from your forums
  • Real time push notifications for officially hosted Discourse forums
  • Authentication via Safari for quicker access to your sites
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thanks @Moin.

I missed the bit about this only working for officially hosted Discourse forums. It looks like chat channels are not running on meta.discourse.org but if there is somewhere else you know of where this is running let me know and I’ll check it out.

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You can use try.discourse.org or a free trial for testing.

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Hey @Earnie_Baird, my apologies for the delay in response. We’ve been digging into this and have a few leads on where the problems might be. Can you confirm the browser you’re using?

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I tested it across Firefox, Chrome and Safari on Mac. Same behavior across all 3.

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