New notifications feature

@humanity said:

Word. It's bizarre and somewhat frustrating.

And now I'm stuck on 1 notification with half a dozen of them in the tab. There doesn't seem to be a way to dismiss these notifications once you get them. It's almost infuriating.

It's madness. Maaaadness!

But at least I'm sort of getting notified of things now.

How do I stop getting notifications every time someone updates an already existing blog?

Came here to ask the same thing @flstyle did. Gotten five notifications for the same blog due to updates. Certainly appreciate getting a heads up for followed user blogs though, so hopefully this minor issue can be resolved without taking that away.

@mento: This is a bug - we're working on it!

cool to see it coming quickly to the mobile site as well

The notifications would be much more useful if they linked to the things that they're notifying you about. It's good to know that my friends are posting blogs, but I would also like to read the blogs. Thanks.

Its broken again. Not being told when I am @ at. Also make it so we can remove built up notifications?

Its done broke

I've not only been not getting message notifications but the forums have been eating my messages as well despite the green bar popping up saying it successfully posted it.

This Notifications issue still feels kind of crazy. Forum posts are probably getting more views than ever as people search for if anyone replied to them. heh. For years, I could mostly trust that I was getting notified on things, and to split up PMs and Notifications for a few users' convenience busts up the whole thing. I know it hasn't been intentional by any stretch, but I'm just surprised it was rolled out on a Friday and is still so broken. I'm sure someone's working on it; it just seems like a rather unfortunate turn of events that will hopefully be over soon.

I also feel like this post should simply be honest with the situation and, for the time being, read:

"New notifications feature! ... Now you just won't get them!" ;)

@truthtellah: I pretty much agree. I don't want to be a big drama queen about it, but "being told when someone responds to you" is a pretty important forum feature to leave broken for several days.

Agreed, for several days I thought I wasn't being replied to at all.

why is it still broken.

Yeah broken for me as well again. As stated above dont wanna drag it out and make a huge deal about it but its hard to keep track of all your ongoing conversation threads without getting notified of updates with as fast as some topics get buried 2 or 3 pages deep sometimes.

@rorie Any update on when this will be fixed? I can understand having some difficulties and this perhaps taking time, but there has been little communication on it. Just some updates on whether they're really on the case and maybe an estimate of how long it's going to take would be appreciated.

I don't think anyone's demanding that it be fixed immediately, as we know it can be tough, but informing us on how the effort to fix a major part of the forums is going seems like the least you guys could do right now.

@truthtellah: I have demands, but they involve pizza being delivered to my house

We demand answers!

... and pizza delivered to Humanity's house.

I was just going to ask him the same thing, but then I realized that he's not being notified when we @reply him either.

Yeah, I feel like sending a PM, but that almost seems more direct or confrontational than a simple reply...

I don't want to come off as mean toward poor Rorie when he's just the liaison between us and the tech staff.

What I'm having a hard time figuring out is why, exactly, they decided to fix something that wasn't broke.

@oldirtybearon: Theoretically, this should allow you to more quickly see all of these updates at a glance without having to dig into a separate PM to see each one. It should also remove a lot of the clutter from your messages to make it easier to use it for real PMs rather than just a bunch of auto generated notifications.

If you look at the big social network sites, the majority of them operate in a similar manner with messages and notifications being separate.

I can definitely understand their intent here, but considering it was broken from day 1, why didn't they roll it back to the working version until they made sure it worked? Or, at the very least, couldn't they give us any update at all on efforts to fix it? Why has this taken a week when fixing the entire site after launch just took a few days? Is this really such a titanic task? I don't understand why they aren't even acknowledging that an important part of the forum is simply broken for a good number of users(just about every user I am aware of).

I have no such qualms! So I shot him a pm.

@truthtellah: I agree. I imagine that the premature roll out of the new notification system occurring the same day as @idbloc's departure probably isn't coincidental.

Quality stuff

Yeah, I just imagine him leaving a bag full of feces in the company fridge as he walked out.

Not that this was intentional, but when everything gets busted as you leave, it certainly gives an impression. ha. Hopefully they'll acknowledge and fix this soon.

Can't trust the french is what I've always said. So I take it, pizza forthcoming?

@truthtellah: My assumption is that the team was probably rushing to wrap up and push a bunch of changes prior to one of their core engineers leaving, and in the process may have cut some corners and pulled some stuff out of the oven before it was done cooking.

Makes sense. Rorie has indicated that they were testing out fixes on Friday and will see about rolling them out on Monday. A good plan by my estimation.

enabled the options to enable notifications and im still not seeing when im tagged for a reply or quote.

At this point I just attribute poor communication about site problems from the staff to the sheer mountain of bugs and glitches the site has had since the site revamping. It's seriously been impossible for me to keep up with the amount of things that have been broken or glitched on the site in the last six months.

Yep, sorry if I didn't get back to you guys in here - I've been in the bug reporting forum. We're aware of plenty of bugs regarding the notifications, and I'm certainly sorry that the system isn't living up to expectations. As I mentioned over in Bug Reporting, we started testing a bunch of bug fixes on Friday, and when the engineering team gets in today, I'll see where we are. Hopefully the transit strike here in SF won't affect that.

@rorie: Thanks for the heads up Rorie, wondered why I wasn't getting any notifications anymore. Keep us updated please!

@rorie: Glad to just hear anything on it. So you think they might try to apply a fix today?