Make the notifications count persistent, like on Github

Hey everybody,

I really like the way Github handles notifications: You click on the notifications icon :bell: and get a list of notifications. However the :red_circle: stays until you’ve read or dismissed all notifications.

In contrast, when I click on the notification count in Discourse, the :four: / :nine: / etc. disappears at once. When I click on one of the notifications, the notification count is gone, and I might miss notifications that are buried in the “view older notifications…” screen.

What do you think? Can this behaviour be improved?

Stefan

3 Likes

I think the idea behind removing the count of notifications is that we don’t want to force you to click on EVERY notification to decrease the count all the way to zero to get it to disappear again.

You still shouldn’t miss any notifications because anything pending should still be highlighted in the notification dropdown and on the “view older notifications…” page.

4 Likes

I think the idea behind removing the count of notifications is that we
don’t want to force you to click on EVERY notification to decrease the
count all the way to zero to get it to disappear again.

I don’t see the problem here. Does it annoy people to see the
notification count?

You still shouldn’t miss any notifications because anything pending should still be highlighted in the notification dropdown and on the “view older notifications…” page.

They are, but: Given the situation that the whole list is highlighted
(more than X notifications). When I have gone through the whole list and
no notifications are highlighted in the dropdown anymore: Are there
still unread notifications? I don’t actually know until I click the
“view older notifications…”-button. Sometimes there will be further
notifications highlighted, sometimes there won’t. Since the count is
gone, I can’t tell beforehand.

I really with there was an option in the user settings to choose if the notification count should disappear or not. In my case I would like it to be persistent i.e. be displayed as long as there are any unread notifications.

3 Likes

I hear you, but lets hold off a bit, we are in the middle of a big notification menu refactor where we call out notifications in each section much better.

@Osama will post here once we are ready for some beta feedback.

3 Likes

Just chiming in here to mention that I also just received a user request for persistent notifications.