When you have no internet connection (for example I was rebooting my router) and you click on the notifications bubble it tells you “You have no notifications right now” - It should instead give an indicator that it is having difficulty reaching the site.
@codinghorror - I classified it as a bug, because it is displaying BOTH that you have a new notification (the green 1 ) and that you have no notifications.
Please refer to the definition of the category
A bug report means something is broken, preventing normal/typical use of Discourse.
This does not prevent normal, typical use of Discourse – particularly when you are offline.
(I’d also argue being offline is not expected use, if you knew about it. There is no offline mode.)
Fair enough… Your board, your rules 
It is really confusing however, especially when the user DOESN’T know they are offline. Granted they are likely to figure it out pretty quick regardless…
I’m fine with it as a proposed “nice to have” feature improvement. But a bug, it is not.
This falls under the more general category of “the error handling is terrible”.
Is this just a matter of updating the copy, or is this message a real message that can exist? As when you join, you get a notification, the Welcome message. So can you ever not have any notifications?
You could delete the welcome message…
No you can’t… At least I can’t here… Messages can’t be deleted… unless you are the sender of it, and that’s even a maybe.
Wow… you are correct… I retract my statement.
Yeah, we should simply update the copy here to “You are not connected to the Internet” or something @codinghorror
You have no notifications right now makes no sense and is basically an impossible situation.
Also error handling here is pretty bad.
I’d go with something more generic like “Unable to connect to <site>.” or something along that vein - they could be connected to the internet but could have a proxy issue, or any number of other situations that could result in not being able to reach the page.
I’d even argue that flat out not being connected is one of the least likely scenarios this would occur in.
It’s the only one that’s happened to me, out of that list. Add “the forum being down”.
Good idea, better copy is always a plus. I will change it later to “unable to load notifications at this time”.
edit: OK that’s done.