Mentions and notifications

[Ant59]

Looking around an Elkarte forum, "mentions" and "notifications" are terms that seem to get used interchangeably.

Can we be a little stricter about this? Notifications should appear in the menu at the top and have a page where they are listed. Types of notifications include replies (to watched topics), mentions, etc..

[Spuds]

You will get no argument around that issue and its an item we want to address in 1.1

When the mention feature was first added I think it was called notifications, but that lead to confusion with the notify button, notifications on boards/topics, notify me of pm's and with the post by email notifications. So we have lots of notify functions, things that "notify" the member. Right now mentions is set to when someone likes your post or uses the @ mention tag in a message.

TBH I'm not sure what would be best there, if there is a best. We can consolidate to a single button and then "branch" out from there to allow listing each notify area under a tab area or whatever. In a way PM's would even go there since those are a notify as well.

[Ant59]

Perhaps we should first define a "glossary of terms" to give us a blueprint to work with.

I would like to propose something similar to the following:

• We have a single notifications menu/list for the user to quickly view anything that requires their attention. This should include mentions, likes and replies to followed threads.
• The current "Notify" button for threads should become "Follow". This way, rather than "requesting notification of replies", a user is simply "following" a thread for replies. Any replies to followed threads should appear in a user's notifications list.
• Likes and mentions are perfect as-is.
• I'm not sure if SMF's karma system is leftover or whether a new one has been implemented on the same code as the like system, but awarded Karma (positive or negative) points for posts should appear in notifications too.
• I would advocate that PMs certainly don't end up in the notifications list, but in their own equally-important Messages list, visible to the user alongside notifications.

Thoughts/opinions? I've tried to be consistent with what users will likely be familiar with from other web services/apps.

[scripple]

Notifications as they are now aren't really follow, at least not in their default settings I believe. The default is to send an email on the first new topic, or new reply, and no others until you visit the forum. So it's not following a thread but really a notification that there is new activity. The only notify once until you visit again I guess helps reduce email load on the forum server and also encourage people to actually come back to the forum.

[emanuele45]

I'm not sure if it's correct to talk about it here or if open a new issue was a better idea, anyway I'm going here just to avoid spread the discussion over too many issues. This is partially related to what @vekseid and @targren discussed in #1968

I started looking into a more consistent and "centralized" notifications system (yeah, I know, I'm not really the best person for this task because I change my mind every two seconds and all that, but that's it). Actually, even while working on #1950 I was already trying to head that way, but then I stopped just to have the code merged. Now I'm going back to that. My current idea is:

• use modules to "hook" into the actions with the mention system
• the mention system loads the enabled mentions and decides if there is some kind of mention to be issued
• if there is any, it enters a record into a db table
• a scheduled task (that would be a task running each minute or so) checks if there is any notification in the queue to send (I decided to follow the scheduled task way just because if too many "mentions" want to send notifications it may be a pain, but anyway that may be tweaked)
• if the scheduled task finds something, it process the request and sends the notification.

The way I'm designing it, the options are:

• no notification at all
• notification (in the form of entry in the mentions/alerts area)
• notification + immediate email
• notification + daily email

I took inspiration from the way WBB handles the preferences, because it seems to make most sense.

In terms of "end-developers", that would mean (unless I'll do something stupid at some point) they have to write a single class with few public methods and the system will take care of everything else. I started few hours ago, so it's still too early to show any code, but at least you know there is something going on.

[emanuele45]

See #2049 Still quite a bit of work to do though.

[JoeMoer]

Apologies if this is not the correct area, but I want "Notifications" turned on by default for all new posts but for the life of me cannot find where to enable that option for all users? Could someone kindly point me in the correct direction please?

[Vekseid]

@JoeMoer it's still inside theme settings, in member options. Lots of stuff is there that shouldn't be, but it's been rather persistent.

[Spuds]

I'm going to close this as the majority of work has been done.

I will say that some additional cleanup in the code, mainly function names / comments, is required as some still have this inconsistency which leads to confusion when you work in that area. Those are fix as found/required.