How to Prep for Notification Center GA?

Thanks for the update ​@Yoeri 

As I’ve stated above, love this as a feature for our registered forum users - but if we can refine it so it’s chronologically accurate and really only providing updates to topics/threads users have been engaged with, it would be near perfect from my perspective!

Yeah, me too! This is long awaited feature and it was really really nice to enable it in beginning of the beta (then it worked fine). I and our users we love it, cant wait to get it in use again! But it have to work as it should.

Hey everyone,

I want to start by sincerely apologizing for the issues you and your community members experienced with the rollout of the Notification Center. We take full responsibility for the inconveniences this has caused. We understand that you rely on our software to be stable and issue-free, and we didn't meet those expectations this time. We have reviewed your concerns and are actively working to address them.

To provide some context on the rollout, our goal with the Notification Center was to introduce an intuitive feature that:

• Is enabled by default (so users can benefit from it immediately)
• Doesn’t require explanation (since notification centers are a common UX pattern in many software tools)

Unfortunately, we didn’t fully live up to this expectation. When we removed the beta toggle to make the Notification Center available to all users, we mistakenly also made it visible to guests/visitors, something that was not intended and was not part of the beta experience. That issue has now been resolved. Additionally, we’re investigating another reported issue: ensuring that all notifications appear in the correct chronological order.

Next to fixing all outstanding issues, we will provide technical documentation (this will be added to our knowledge base shortly) and we'll review our release process.

We're committed to earning back your trust and ensuring a better experience moving forward. As always, we truly value your feedback and will continue working hard to improve.

If you’re still experiencing any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.

Thanks ​@Yoeri your honest reply and the info.

We all do mistakes - it is matter how you response and fix things. These matters the most.

I think now we are on good track. Have a nice weekend 🙂

Thanks, ​@Yoeri. 

I get the overall strategy, but IMO this is a very high bar to clear: 

Doesn’t require explanation (since notification centers are a common UX pattern in many software tools)

My concern that started this initial thread and I think is represented in some of the recent comments is that things were not clear and intuitive from a settings and expected functionality perspective.

Sure, the UI itself was intuitive and in line with very common UX patterns. No major issues there. 

But my experience in the beta, including using it for months here on the Gainsight community, is that there were no new settings options, causing confusion over if/how we could differentiate between NC settings and email notification settings. Even now, the Notification Settings page on this community (where it’s been live for 3+ months) is framed as email only with no mention of the NC. 

Documentation will help with most of this; once clarified we can edit the phrases accordingly. But without having it at launch (or preferably in advance), we’re left to test ourselves or guess. We can test in a beta, but we don’t know if you might be changing that based on feedback we provide along the way. That’s the root of my frustration, personally, so I’m very glad to hear documentation is coming soon. Thank you. 

But FWIW, I disagree with joint settings for both email notifications and NC notifications. It’s my hope that changes with future enhancements. I’ll reserve more details for an idea (if necessary) after I see the documentation details. 

Me personally, I am not sure about the settings or the need of documentation. If NC is intuitive, you don´t need them. Yeah, at the moment NC is not intuitive 😊

If I compare to the Khoros, they dont have any settings for NC either. They have settings only for the Email notifications as well.

In my mind NC is independent entity, works only on the site and it “alerts” all the time and about everything. Then there are email notifications and you can set their  behaviour as you wish.

Thanks ​@Yoeri for your clarification and transparenty. I appreciate that.

Regarding the settings, it would be nice to have options to receive notifications via mail or in the NC, of maybe both. Some of our users don't want to receive them double. Which I understand. When opening the link from the notification mail the message in NC doesn't change, it still needs to be marked as read manually.

Others also would like an option to not have the NC at all. But I also imagine you guys prefer that not to happen (after everything is finished) 🙂

In my mind NC is independent entity, works only on the site and it “alerts” all the time and about everything. Then there are email notifications and you can set their  behaviour as you wish.

Interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’ll be curious to see what the docs say about how it works; if it’s independent that way or if the settings are tied to the same email notifications. In previous testing, I was under the impression the same settings applied.

This is something I dont understand. If you dont need it, or want it, let it just be 😀 

Personally I agree, because it didn't show the recent notifications I've been ignoring it a bit. Including the badge. Some people can't ignore a badge with a number in it, apparently 😜

I wish their settings are not tied together. If I dont want to receive email notifications, I would like to see from TC whats happening. Or, if I dont want to follow anything, at all, then I just disable email notifications and forget the TC.

If settings are tied together, then there are no so many ways to follow whats happening.

I dont know. My brains are tired after long week and hours 😀

Danny, you beat me to it 😉 I was about to provide an update including a link to the documentation. But here it goes anyway.

Thanks everybody for your continued feedback and ideas. We have published documentation to the Notification Center (link here or in the post above). The issue where notifications didn’t appear in a chronological order should be resolved as well. We are investigating a report where notifications can’t be opened in a new browser and will keep you informed about any updates we have. 

Please let us know if you have additional questions and feedback. 

Thanks, ​@Yoeri, I appreciate the fast action on these items. 

Hi folks. I'm wondering how the notifications tool handles posts deleted as spam. I suspect it doesn’t. For example, we deleted a ton of spam posts over the weekend, but I still get notifications about them! It would be nice if my notification panel was cleared of these.

Hey ​@FMEEvangelist thanks for reporting. The Notification Center and the Spam Prevention feature operate standalone. At first the spam prevention checker will check any new posts of spam, if they capture a post as spam the post will instantly be moved to the spam folder and it will not be published on the community. As a result this post will not be shown on the community.

If the spam prevention checker ‘approves’ the post, the post will be published on the community. Any post that is published on the community (and that the user is subscribed too) will appear in the notification center.

Keep in mind that our spam prevention checker will not capture 100% of spam posts at first, it is a living artefact that needs to learn from new spam attempts, you can help the spam prevention checker to learn by manually marking posts (that were not captured at first) as spam. Spammers are constantly looking for new ways and strategies to make it to the community. Unfortunately some posts will make it through. To learn more about spam and tactics on how to combat it see our ‘Dealing with spam’ knowledge base

FYI on a bug (and the interim fix) I reported in ticket #355055

Bug

When I edit a phrase in the NC from the front end UI, it breaks the styling code in the phrase. 

Hide contentShow content

 

Fix

Backend Control > Customize > Phrases

1. Find the phrase for that update type from this documentation
   1. If it’s not there, add it as a new phrase with the Module and Key from that same link
2. Edit the phrase, pasting in the original from the documentation and updating accordingly to suit your customization needs. 
3. Save and double check it worked

Thanks Danny! Also want to inform everyone here that notifications can now be opened in a new browser tab again (‘right-click’ on a notification)

Ctrl-click (on Windows) doesn't work yet for me, but right click does. Thanks for adding it so quickly, you can tick of my idea with that 😁

• Notification center: Allow right click -> open in new tab Released
• 4 Votes

You are right Jasper, it’s just right-clicking that works - the alt-click not. I will close the idea

I find that scroll wheel click also works for opening in a new tab, so I'm pleased 😄

One of our users was wondering why notifications aren't marked as read when he opens the topic or reply manually, outside of the NC. Often he has already visited a number of topics and replies before opening the NC, and then those topics and replies are still marked red in there. Which makes the NC less intuitive to use. 

​@Yoeri, will ctrl-click be introduced, or is that something that you can't influence? 

Some more feedback from our end-users:

Will mentions also be added to the NC?

One user would like to be able to turn off e-mail notifications, but if he doesn't see his mentions in the NC, he can't.

And a question from me, what would we need to edit in the css to change the colour of the notification bubble?

Thanks for your feedback ​@Erik_ see the answers to your questions below.

Re: introducing ctrl-click to open a notification
Our team will need to investigate the possibilities

Re: Notifications not marked as red
Email notification and in-app notifications are two separate channels of notification read/unread state of the notification item of either of these channels will not be in sync.

Re: Notifications for Mentions
Mention notifications are available in the NC:

Re: Notification bubble CSS

.notification-center__badge

Is the code used for the Counter on top of the bell icon

.notification-center .notification-center__item .notification-center__item__indicator

Is used for the ‘Mark as read’ icon in the NC itself

Excellent, thank you ​@Yoeri. 

A follow-up question:

Re: Notifications not marked as red
Email notification and in-app notifications are two separate channels of notification read/unread state of the notification item of either of these channels will not be in sync.

Check, I understand. But if you just browse the community and in doing so go to a topic that you also have a notification for, wil that mark the notification? Or is the NC in all cases separate from other ways of reaching a topic/reply/message?

And some new feedback. We're seeing that visited topics lose the red icon within the NC, which is good. But they remain in the same spot in the list. Can it be made so that unopened notifications are always at the top? I don't go through the notifications in the listed order, I open whichever is the most in need of attention, which leaves me with a mixed list of read and unread things.

And since the notification dot on the icon disappears as soon as you open it, I have no way to verify I've opened everything unless I do a lot of scrolling to verify.

Which leads me to the second wish: could the dot be made to show not the number of new notifications, but instead the total number of unread ones? Or possibly make this into a setting?