Lack of interest Notifications, tough to see where new/old end after clicking the alert once

[beerForo]

In this day and age we get tons more notifications than before. With that said, when you get a ton, and click the notifications alert, and click the first one to read the post, when you revisit the alert tab they are not bold anymore, because you visited the menu, not because you read them. Now it's tough to see where the "new" ones end and the old ones start.

Could a solution be to (as-is) remove the red alert but keep the content titles bold that were not clicked? This way when you revisit and need to enter/exit 19 times you can at least see where it starts and ends.

And can visiting the content (or page it is on) unbold it? So it works in reverse so to speak.

Or, can there be some kind of divider line? Something like a date divider that shows your visits.

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Just some ideas, thanks!

 

[beerForo]

Okay I am noticing they are never actually bold (I think?), but the background is highlighted white on new ones but I can't find the rhyme or reason to when they are highlighted. I visited each link and revisited, still highlighted. I logged out and back in, still. I checked the window a few more times, at 17 minutes #2 went away, #1 was still highlighted. #1 went away at 20 minutes, without visiting any content.

I'm not sure exactly how this works, can anyone explain? Thank you!

 

[RobinHood]

I think the notification highlighting is time constrained in terms of new/old highlighting, and they don't track if you've visited the notification or not.

I'm not sure if there's any other comprehensive suggestion on notifications, but the entire system could do with a little bit of an overhaul to make them a bit more manageable, modern, interactive and easier to use.

For example, grouping lots of similar notifications (ie. beerforo and 8 other people have reacted to your post, instead of 8 separate notifications)
The ability to easily see which ones you have actually clicked and visited or not, to make it easier when working your way through them.
The ability to mark notifications as unread to you can come back them later - although this one may not be as important now that we have a decent bookmarks system.
The ability to hide or clear specific notifications from your feed.
A pop over when you hover your mouse over reaction notifications so you can see a snippet of the post in question without having to load a whole new page and leave your notification feed.

I half hoped there would be a notification system refresh with 2.1. Now that we have the awesome push system, maybe the drop down and core notification system can be revisited for the next release as it's a very important core feature, used every single site visit that could definitely do with a bit of attention.

Some design elements could be altered to make it easier to browse the notification feed, so you can easily scan and find the notifications your actually interested or want to prioritise and action at the time, there's quite a few different actions these days. On some XF sites I visit I get **** loads of notifications and when looking at the list after many have accumulated they all look really similar,

x replied to the thread y
x and y other people reacted to your post
x added the media item
x started a thread called y
Your post was moved
etc

The ability or stock inclusion of these to have the design of each type of notification style differently could be quite useful for very active sites. Then again, it might not be as necessary if the unread vs read or new vs visited system actually changed the styling in real time.

 

[beerForo]

I think the notification highlighting is time constrained in terms of new/old highlighting

If it's a timed task it even seems random, had 2 come in at the same time, unhiglighted at different times, some earlier, some later after clicking the alert, I still cannot find a rhyme or reason.