Long click path for a small piece of advice

Every now and then I get a group notification so I see a (1) next to my avatar.

First click: I see a “1 message in your admins inbox” notification.

The second click takes me to /messages/group/admins and there is a “New advice on your site dashboard” message.

Opening that with a third click gives me a message stating I should visit the dashboard with a link to /admin

The fourth click, on that link, takes me to the dashboard page which then says “Updates are available for the following themes:”

Every time I fall for this I feel disappointed and tired.
How about having a notification that takes me to /admin in a single click?

13 Likes

About how often do you get this kind of notification about a theme update being available?

2 Likes

Not enough to stop falling for this every time but enough to be annoyed by it.

I guess weekly on each forum it applies to, times the amount of forums I am admin on, which is probably a bit above the average :wink: . And now I think about it, I refrain from updating specific theme components because some of them tend to break on stable.

A lower frequency would not make it less weird though.

5 Likes

Just to make sure I understand the sequence here, I’m going to echo it back as a numbered list.

Current state:

  1. See new blue notification and click to open menu
  2. See “1 message in your admins inbox” notification and click notification
  3. See admins inbox with personal messages listed including “New advice on your site dashboard” and click to open it.
  4. See personal message saying “visit dashboard” and click link
  5. Arrive at /admin dashboard and see “Updates are available for the following themes”

Proposed:

  1. See new blue notification and click to open menu
  2. See “New advice on your site dashboard” notification and click notification
  3. Arrive at /admin dashboard and see “Updates are available for the following themes”

Let me know if I got this right.

10 Likes

Yes, that sounds great, it would drastically reduce the amount of clicks (from 4 to 2).

7 Likes

Hello,

As of recently, this is how the “New advice on your site dashboard” message is delivered:


It’s sent as a pm to admins.
This method is inefficient and can eventually clutter the end user’s inbox. Instead, I think it would be better delivered as a notification like this:

I’m pretty sure I saw this in an earlier version, but I can’t find the photo nor any evidence of it existing anymore.

3 Likes

Ah yeah, that’s a good idea. This was sticking out to me today as well, how many clicks it is to get to the dashboard.

First the notification…

Screenshot 2023-04-17 at 13-33-51 forums

…which goes to the group inbox…

…which opens a message with a link to the admin dashboard…

…where we find an upgrade is available:

Screenshot 2023-04-17 at 13-34-51 forums


I go through the clicking process, so I make note to archive the message in the group inbox. For large self-hosted sites, this is a way to ensure someone notices an upgrade is available. For a single admin site, it’s a lot of clicking. :laughing:

Here’s a proposal: use a notification that links directly to the dashboard as @darkpixlz suggests…

…but keep the admin group PM if no action is taken after some amount of time (two weeks? :thinking:).

3 Likes

Not quite sure on this one.

On my site, I get a push notification every time something happens, as expected. However, 9 times out of 10 it’s something like “upload a favicon for apple devices”, “a theme has an update”, or in my case, “smtp is misconfigured”. I get a notification every few days reminding me that I haven’t setup my smtp proxy for the site which currently has no users. Half of the time, the issue is something which can be fixed in a rebuild (such as theme updates, discourse being out of date, etc)

A while ago, there was a discussion to add an option to outright disable it:

I dont think completely disabling it is the right path, more just disabling the spam and making it less persistent to change something minor.

1 Like

I’ve moved these over as requested @darkpixlz :+1: :slight_smile:

5 Likes

We haven’t gotten to it yet, but I think we agree it makes sense to do something like the following:

We are thinking we can model this after the recent notification we added for the new features feed, but in this case, we would like to also clear out the “new advice” notification if it’s been resolved by another admin.

3 Likes

Since this commit you will receive a notification instead of a private message to let you know about any admin problems. Clicking on it will take you straight to the admin page. :sparkles:

8 Likes

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