Has it ever been considered to hide notifications from the top menu after they have been clicked? I’m participating in a very active topic on my community, and it’s hard to keep track of all the responses I’m getting. I imagine it’s even more difficult for the power users on our site. Curious to hear other people’s thoughts.
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Can you screenshot what you mean by “hide notifications from the top menu”? There is a “dismiss all” button on your notifications tab in your user profile (which is linked to by the “view older notifications…”) link at the bottom of the notification list.
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Did you happen to mean like this for example?
Before you view the notifications:
Then after you click on the first four notifications:
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I see now that the experience does match that of Facebook
revisiting what my experience was, as I was participating in a topic last night with lots of replies, it didnt seem like the notifications were that useful. I should have taken a screenshot last night. I think there were a bunch of like notifications on the topic I was already participating in.
This morning, I realize most of my notifications look similar, where users had mentioned me on the topic.
I am going to pay more attention to the notifications, and will try to come back with some more specific recommendations. But when 6 users send me private messages with the same subject, it starts becoming noise. I’d prefer easy access to an inbox with previews of the messages themselves
I’d say that simply hiding them when clicked would cause more problems than it solves since these links are a very convenient way of getting to currently relevant posts (to mention just one use case: you have a number of notifications about replies and might first read all of them before deciding which ones to the reply to).
That said, I agree that it would be nice to be able to dismiss selected (rather than all) notifications in order to get rid of unwanted clutter, especially various badges or posts that you do not want to react to. Perhaps every notification could have a little X in the top right corner which will delete/hide the notification from the user menu (not sure if this should also apply to the notification page).
If this would work even when the notification has not been clicked, this would also be a solution for a nuisance that was discussed earlier (can’t find the topic any more), namely that people would like be able to mark like or badge notifications as read without actually visiting the link.strong text
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@codinghorror would you happen to know the rules for when notifications get populated? If i am actively reading a topic and responding in it, will I still see notifications for the mentions?
What I realized today is that i had lots of notifications for being mentioned in the same topic. And it made it difficult to pay attention to things going on in the rest of the community
If your problem is with one specific topic, you could simply mute that topic…
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Fair point. Just in general, as I am starting to participate more, I am noticing that people tend to mention me in an active discussion as it is taking place. So by the time I see the notifications of being mentioned, I had already read the replies.