New notifications feature

We're debuting a new notifications feature on Comic Vine and Giant Bomb. What we've done is split up notifications and private messages into two separate systems. As such, you'll now have a notifications indicator and a PM inbox in the upper right corner of your screen. Notifications will still let you know when another user follows you, comments on your content, posts on your wall, and so forth, whereas the PM inbox is now exclusively for your private messages. This should reduce inbox clutter for the most active members of our community.

In addition, we've simplified the large number of notification options that we used to feature on your Settings page into a smaller group of options to choose from. You should check your settings page to ensure that these options are up to date. (To do so, hover over your avatar in the upper right corner of the screen and select the Settings button.) We'll also soon be adding the option to get email notifications as a weekly digest if you prefer not to get individual emails for each notification.

Notifications are marked as read when you view them, but you can always view older notifications by visiting the Notifications tab of your profile.

Let us know what you think, and feel free to post any feedback on these new features in this thread.

oh my gosh this is the best feature I didn't even know I wanted. I turned off the one that tells you when someone responds to you because I post a lot, but now I can watch it tick up higher and higherrrrrrr

I definitely like the sounds of these changes. Great stuff!

Thanks!

This is fantastic and I approve.

Apparently I walked in just in time to see this. I think it's a good change. Weekly emails is a nice touch as well =)

Now for a well-deserved nap.

I'm not too much of an active user, but these are still welcome changes.

/whew

Now bring back the "old Wall" and we coo'. :)

I think the split is a good thing. For me, I don't really get many messages, mostly notifications. On the rare instance I get a pm now, I can easily know and find it. Good on ya GB top men.

Sounds good to me.

Kickass no more cleaning out the inbox clutter!

Smooth, real smooth....

Are staff and mods still automatically followed by new users? Because if so, the new grouping of notification stuff could be an issue. It would mean we can't get notifications of wall posts or recommendations because if we allow that option we'll get hundreds of notifications of new followers from new users.

If we aren't followed by new users anymore, ignore me.

@mattyftm: currently only specific staff members are automatically followed by new users.

Only certain staff members are auto followed (the ones in the twitter pod)

Is this one step closer to getting back the "here are the duders, from the list of people you follow, who are online" feature? Because that was great back in the day.

Hurray! Sounds good!

Look forward to seeing if the notifications for new blogs/reviews from friends works. If so, that'll be a huge boon to the content-producing community that's been feeling isolated ever since the site came back. Hopefully some of the people who have left us since then will wander back. It's tough being one of like four guys who ever plays JRPGs around here.

I'd suggest making everything default ON for notifications (except maybe the wiki sub approved/rejected one) and default OFF for emails. I can't imagine people would be too happy with a sudden influx of email spam from the site.

@winternet: maybe. can't promise anything yet as we're testing some prototypes.

So how do you clear notifications after viewing them? I have one right now from a @ reply that isn't clearing even after I viewed it.

@demoskinos: our front page is caching a bit too aggressively. we'll be fixing it in the next 1-2 days, but you could see up some lag time (up to 30 min at most) if you don't get a new notification.

@demoskinos: It's on a timer and should clear out after 30 minutes.

Can I still trade in my old posts?

Where was Patrick on this breaking news? He's slackin'. =P

I thought that this was available with the old site? Either way I am glad that it is here because my PM box was getting full of non PM related articles.

No more PMs!

@ltsquigs: @mrpibb: Why am I being automatically dragged to the bottom of a forum topic, to the comment field, when I select it? It's hard to develop a comment when you technically still don't know what the topic is about.

This is pretty awesome!

Also this.

Yay!

YAY! Now I'll have two indicators that show 0.

@zombiepie: @chavtheworld: Are you clicking the topic link or the >> next to it?

@ltsquigs: It happens sometimes when you click on the topic link. sometimes when clicking the >> it goes to the last page but stays on the top of it.

@rorie:

Would it be too much to hope for that one day notifications will let you know when a user you're following makes a blog? Pretty please? :) It's still a bit hard to find that stuff. That would be pretty sweet.

If you click on the >> and its on the first page it will take you to the bottom of the topic, otherwise we don't do any scrolling outside of what the browser does automatically.

What he said. Also oh damn now I'm getting hot email notifications. Let's go fix that...

Edit: Oh weird, all notifications were off and I only had emails on for "friends updates". Explains why I got one when you replied me Squigs. In fact that explains nothing... I don't follow you Squigs (sorry).

Also the problem with forum links is that all of them are like this:

http://www.giantbomb.com/super-smash-bros-brawl/3030-20588/forums/for-anyone-who-has-project-m-552040/#3

Which means if it is a one page topic, it auto scrolls to the bottom as if you had clicked >>

Actually, while I have you engineer people talking about skipping to the end of things, can we please please have PMs open on the last page? It's really weird to have them open on the first page just to make me scroll to the bottom and click last every time to see the new post...

It's automatically scrolling even if you just select the forum topic title.

Looking at our settings page now there is an option for "friends updates" which you can set notifications on for, and emails. Don't know if it works though.

@ltsquigs: I've tired it on different topics and it looks like the going to bottom of the page thing is only with topics with one page. Topics with more then one page when clicking on the topic tittle link it stays at the top of the page.

Will look into the topic problem when possible, not sure if a recent change did that or what.

Ok weve identified the scrolling problem. I dont know when it will be fixed.

@ltsquigs: Could you @reply me again please to see if I still get emails now I have it all turned off? And do you think PM's taking you to the last page is a possible thing for the future?

@chavtheworld: It might be possible in the future , heres a pm dog.

Interesting, was wondering why there was a new symbol up there.

@ltsquigs: Thanks! Okay I totally get emails when you reply me, even though I have all emails turned off. Don't know if it's cause you're staff or I'm just gunna get that from everyone however.

@chavtheworld: can you reply me?

@mrpibb: I can indeed.

@chavtheworld: hmmm, i didn't get an email. Did you receive one when I replied?

@mrpibb: Yep every time. I'm pretty sure it's cause you're staff, but I haven't had any normal users reply me yet. Here are my notification settings for the record:

I guess I misunderstood that top one. I haven't changed that from before the new notifications, but I assumed that was just if staff PM'd me or wanted to email me directly.

@chavtheworld: Testing. Did you get this as an email?

@monkeyman04: Alright, you are definitely not staff. Yeah it's busted :P Thanks for the testing help!

Just out of curiosity, did you get one too?