Community notification centre for likes, mentions, quoted replies, poll votes, best answers

@m4rc Thanks a lot for submitting this idea. It does make sense for highly active users to avoid filling their inbox. I'm curious what percent of your community do you consider would use this notification center?

In purely terms of numbers @Marion Frecaut it’s a small %. 

But, we’re talking about the most engaged members, who between them get about 80% of best answers. They’re the most valuable members, and enable us to scale. 

This is a no brainer. Can you imagine a super user’s email inbox after a day in the community? The solution to this can’t be turn off notifications, because they need them to fulfil their duty. 

Hey @Marion Frecaut do you have any updates on this idea please?

Hello @m4rc. We have no short term plan to implement this idea. However, we are aware of the spamming effect that receiving email notifications as they currently have can. We are keeping our ears open to any extra feedback we get on this topic until it becomes a good time to pick it up.

We have no short term plan to implement this idea

That’s a pity. It would be so useful for our superusers.

I recently did some regression analysis on what are the main triggers for achieiving 80%+ deflection rates from a peer-to-peer support community, such as ours.

The biggest driver is highly engaged users. Not page views or registrations or even number of topics. It’s all down to the small but highly engaged group of superusers.

If they’re put off by the fact that they can’t get a simple set of notifications of mentions, replies, similar to what they experience in Facebook communities, I worry we’ll lose them. 

I see this idea’s got 7 upvotes. How many would you normally need to escalate it  @Marion Frecaut ?

@m4rc We don't currently use 'vote thresholds' on inSpired, so I can't give a precise number. You can see all the rules we have for our ideation section in this article. 

Howdy!

I just wanted to chip in with some related feedback that was brought up recently. It’s a pretty long discussion and does have links that go off-platform, but I’ve cut directly to where it was mentioned.

I might split some elements out to a new Idea though. On average, I probably get 300+ notifications a week, so having a sort of “Dynamic Mode” would be useful. If I’m currently logged in, I’d love to have the option to freeze email alerts and expose them only within the in-app inbox (with an optional audible alert). But if I’m currently logged out, send the emails out.

I’ve got some more thoughts as well. Bear with me and I’ll check for existing posts!

Hey @Marion Frecaut 

I think it's super important, as users use to have their “notification” from facebook, and once they visit the platform to see those red dots will help with more engagement - something that really important to our community. 

Exactly @nate2  These are our most important members - for engagement, for deflection, and in order to scale numbers. 

Imagine for a second that all your LinkedIn notifications trigger an email. It’ll become a full time job to review them all, let alone reacting to them. 

This has been a standard feature for a decade now in Community platforms and a hot usecase for Insided users for over 2 years now. Any progress @daniel.boon, @Marion Frecaut ?

Every community has their super users, roughly 1% of it´s users. And this feature is for them. 

I would like to see the feed but also some kind of pop up what indicates that something just has happened.

this feature is for every user. The super users would miss it even more agreed, but today, tell me a successful app/platform which does not offer an effective notification experience for activities?

Each day Slack wins on this 1 simple capability… staying on top of convos, getting responses, getting direct actions from the intended people

@Alex Campos 

We are preparing to launch our community, and the beta testing group brought this up as well. Many want a notification ‘center’ like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Our users are busy government leaders, so if they get several email notifications it becomes an extra step for them to go back to their email inbox to determine which was the notification they wanted to follow up on. 

Yeah, this is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Having a true notification center in-app would be so much better than trying to sift through multiple emails. 

This is especially true for folks who help moderate but who don’t spend hours a day in the inSided backend keeping track of replies to posts. If I help 3-5 people a day I’d love an easier way to know when they’re replied/mentioned me, so I can hop back in. 

I tried creating an automation in Zapier based on the emails that are sent when I’m mentioned, but I haven’t even been receiving those emails consistently. So automating it is a moot point, if the emails don’t come :( 

So many good points in this thread! Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts. 

Agree that a notification icon would be incredibly useful for our members as well. I would agree with the Facebook analogy - many social platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc.) have notification tabs that help members see where they are mentioned and what new topics have been commented on. It would be great if there’s an easy to so consolidate this information, since getting emails can be pretty taxing. 

One of my community members (an Advisory Council member, in fact) gave us feedback that he ignores the notification emails, because he doesn’t think its useful to open each email just to find that it’s not a topic he particularly cares about. It would be easier if he could see it all in one go, and choose (based on title/content) what to engage on. 

I think for me as well, it would be extremely helpful to have a dedicated page where all the notifications can go, as well as having a pop-up notification centre like Atlassian does, such as these examples.

I’ve gotten pretty used to that way of doing things because I can just leave one page open somewhere and it refreshes itself anytime anything interesting happens. But at the same time, still have direct access to it from anywhere without leaving the current page.

Any news about this idea?

I would welcome this feature so much. Some Super Users turn of notification mails because it's spammy, but a notifications a la FB or something would be less so. Like some said: this should be a no brainer.

This is becoming more and more important. We want to keep users on the platform when it makes sense, they shouldn’t have to go check their emails to see if they got a response to their topic, have been quoted, got a post marked as best answer, or mentioned in the platform. And most importantly, there’s no way to see if they got a like on their post, unless they find it back somehow through the community or their profile.

InSided as a platform is very, very strong, but it’s lacking severely in these ‘little’ quality of life features, that users come to expect based on their general internet travels.