Questions About The Notification System

Feature
1

I am very confused about the Notification system and I would appreciate any suggestions or perhaps info about plugins.

First and most important, I don’t understand why the “Dismiss” button does not seem to do anything. I was thinking that the Notification list would provide me a clearly marked list of new posts in threads to which I had responded, or information about new messages to me in the messaging system, that I could then check and then make go away after I had checked them.

Maybe it is because I am administrator and I see so many system messages, but what I get instead seems to be a very confusing list of icons and clipped messages (“Thanks for spending time with us” is a big one) that don’t really tell me anything and don’t disappear when I click dismiss.

What I really want my users (and myself) to see is a clear list of links pointing me to active private message threads and active threads in which I have posted. I don’t need most of the rest which I think is going to be seen by my users as just clutter.

Perhaps I misunderstand how to set up the notifications and that’s the problem? Or are there any plugins that might make the presentation of each item more clear, or provide the ability to clear (dismiss) the list?

That last is probably the worst problem. I was thinking through notifications I could keep track of whether I had looked at new material, then dismiss those notices, and come back next time to see a list of only the new activity. I especially miss the ability to see a bright red dot that alerts me to new private messages.

What am I missing?

Thank you for any suggestions!

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2

“Dismiss” just marks them as read. DEpending on your settings and where you’re looking at it, it will have different behavior. In your personal messages inbox, that just means that the notification will be marked as read, not removed from your notifications. Note that this doesn’t mean I have read the message.

If you’re in /new, it will dismiss them from view, because they’re not new anymore. They are still present. It’s just an unread notification action.

Example:

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image499×852 66.4 KB

After dismissal:

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image511×832 66.2 KB

The actual message has not been marked as read. See here:

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image1153×255 18.4 KB

“Dismiss” from the profile menu only affections notifications and their read state.

2 Likes
3

Thanks for the info. So is there no way via plugin or option to have the dropdown box (which is the main way I and a lot of my users interact with the site) just show a list of UNREAD notifications?

I think a lot of my regular users use the program that way - they want to go to a single place and find a list of the threads and messages they need to click over to and read, and then they want that list to dwindle down to nothing as they make decisions on whether to read them or not, and dismiss the notification.

Any way to do that?

4

Broadly speaking, discourse only sends you a notification when someone is speaking directly to you. That is:

  • they replied to your post
  • they quoted your post
  • they mentioned your @username
  • they linked to your post

As far as arbitrarily being notified about specific topics or specific categories, use the :bell: bell icon on the topic or category and set it as you prefer.

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