@codinghorror here’s a feature I’d like to see: is it possible to suppress email notification alerts if the notification has already been acknowledged in-app? This is something that Discord and Slack do and I really appreciate it. It’s somewhat annoying to see notification bubbles in Discourse, go check out the corresponding activity, then like an hour later see the same notifications show up in my email.
In functional requirements terms it’d be something like “Notification email shouldn’t be sent if the notification has been acknowledged in the app’s notification area”. I think my expected mental model would be that this would mean not just opening up the notification area where a new notification is waiting, but clicking on the individual notfication to follow it to the activity in question.
(Of course I don’t know how email notifications are enqueued so this might not be as simple as it seems…)
I can imagine that some folks might still want those emails even if they’ve seen the notification, so could consider making this a toggle in account settings.
Right, but the subtlety here is that I want the email… unless I’ve already seen the alert in person. That’s the piece that seems to be missing (but which is present in the other apps I mentioned).
EDIT: Ohhh, I see, you’re pointing out another setting that I hadn’t previously seen. Maybe that’s the one I want, let me give it a try. Oops, and thanks!
You might be able to do that using uBlock Origin - in addition to it’s ad blocking might it can usually remove specific elements from a page (for example, on my PC it hides the link from the main article to the bbs post for the article.
Not because I want it to…it just does and I have never taken the time to figure out why, since I read boingboing from the bbs anyway
Ooh, I see that notifications for “new posts on a forum set to ‘watching’” now has its own icon! Slick. Previously (I think!) it used to just treat these equivalently to “replies” alerts.
I’m not so sure about the new icons. It seems a bit less intuitive. Dunno, though. This is new, right? The bells with exclamation point? I can tell what they mean, but have never seen them before.
After poking around a bit I realized that it’s the same icon that’s used when you set a thread to “watching”, so it makes a certian amount of sense. I think the bell! icon has been used for a while in that context. So the concordance pleases me.
However, I’m not in love with it as an icon either. Maybe we need a better icon for “watching”. Possibly a creepy eyeball. Or not.
Is the “message was edited” pencil supposed to do something when you click on it? It gives me the “clicky pointer” when I mouseover and gets a focus highlight, so I expect something to come up when I click on it (like an edit history? If the pencil is one of my own posts it sometimes does this), but more often than not nothing happens.
I can’t answer about the colors, but the pencil is there to let readers know that the post they are reading might have said something very different before.
That’s why it’s best, even if you’ve just caught a typo, to add an ETA at the end of a post to make it clear what you changed.
Right, I understand its informative purpose, but what is less clear to me is why it appears to be an interactive element, but doesn’t actually seem to interact most of the time.
It may be a leftover from when users could view the edit history of a post. The functionality is gone, but maybe the “mouseover” code is intact.
If I understand it correctly, orange pencil means the poster esited the post, gray means the system edited the post, and brown means an admin edited the post.
I’ve meant to ask this for quite some time, but forgot the name of this thread and just stumbled back in from a link. Anyway…
What does the little envelope signify that appears next to a user’s response occasionally? I assumed it meant they has DM’ed me, but there’s never anything there. Unfortunately, it’s never consistently there and doesn’t seem to “follow” a user to different topics. I can’t even find an example right now to screen shot.
