A lightweight Discourse theme component that automatically dismisses (hides) specific system notifications in the user menu for admins.
This component is designed to reduce UI noise and cognitive load—especially helpful for neurodivergent admins (like me), or those who update their instances frequently and track changes via Meta (like me), or just YOLO admins who live on the edge in their development forums! (also like me)
Settings
The following notifications can be automatically dismissed in the component admin settings:
Setting
Description
No new features notifications
Hide notifications for new features
No upcoming change promoted notifications
Hide notifications for upcoming changes automatically promoted
No invitee accepted notifications
Hide notifications for invitees accepted
No membership accepted notifications
Hide notifications for group membership accepted (note: does not affect consolidation of membership notifications)
No granted badge notifications
Hide notifications for granted badges
No review queue badges
Hide notifications for reviewable flags if admin is NOT a member of the moderator group
Only admin users are affected; for example non-admins will still get notified of their granted badges or accepted invites regardless of the settings enabled in this component.
Note that the No review queue badges setting only affects the flag notifications if the admin is NOT a member of the moderator group. Flag count will still show in the review queue sidebar, so that admins can still keep track of pending flags that need review.
the settings affect all admin users. there is no granularity for specifying only specific admins in the admin group. that would need it to be developed as a plugin that adds the settings to the preferences/notification tab for admin users, which i don’t really feel like building at the moment - unless of course you have a budget and will pay me to do it.
If all of the component’s setting are enabled, one can end up with an empty other notifications tab or all notifications tab depending on how busy their forum notifications are.
Admin notifications for upcoming changes can now be automatically dismissed with a setting in user preferences -> notifications.
I am not responsible if this component somehow makes you miss an important notification!
Maybe this is it lol. Diagnosed ADHD here. I wish I took a screenshot a few mins ago but woke up to ~ 30 accepted invites and could only see the last 15 in the notification box (would prefer not to have to visit /u/hydn/notifications just because invites take up all the dropdown slots). At the very least, it’s been off-putting that there was no built-in way to manage that.
btw, if a person wants to test this component’s settings without having to do the actual actions that trigger these notifications (and you have ssh access), you can use these commands in the rails console to trigger those respective event notifications (use the triggers applicable to your component’s settings):
cd /var/discourse
.launcher enter app
rails c
# find and set your user variable
u = User.find_by_username("YOUR ADMIN USERNAME")
# trigger: new features
Notification.create!(
user: u,
notification_type: Notification.types[:new_features],
read: false,
data: {}.to_json
)
# trigger: invitee accepted
Notification.create!(
user: u,
notification_type: Notification.types[:invitee_accepted],
read: false,
data: { display_username: "awesome_new_user" }.to_json
)
# trigger: group membership accepted
Notification.create!(
user: u,
notification_type: Notification.types[:membership_request_accepted],
read: false,
data: { group_name: "Trust_Level_4" }.to_json
)
# trigger: granted badge
Notification.create!(
user: u,
notification_type: Notification.types[:granted_badge],
read: false,
data: { badge_name: "Great Topic", badge_id: 10 }.to_json
)
# trigger: upcoming change promoted
Notification.create!(
user: u,
notification_type: Notification.types[:upcoming_change_automatically_promoted],
read: false,
data: {
upcoming_change_humanized_name: "Experimental CSS",
upcoming_change_name: "experimental_css"
}.to_json
)
# broadcast (Watch your browser in another window or tab when you hit enter!)
u.publish_notifications_state
best way to test is to disable the setting in the component you want to test and run the related rails trigger command, see the notification pop up, then enable the setting and do a hard refresh to see them disappear.
i made some improvements for mass notifications (like a bunch of badges getting triggered) and i added a new setting to auto-dismiss pending flag notifications from the review queue if the admin is NOT a member of the moderator group. the flag count will still show in the sidebar review queue section, so admins will still be able to keep track, but without the notification noise in the user menu:
Overview
Settings
Important Notes
