How to view your Mumsnet notifications

[JanineMumsnet]

As of today, some of you may notice that your ‘My Mumsnet’ icon at the top right of the screen will start to show a red numbered notification icon. We are rolling out a new notifications feed, the purpose of which is to let you know when there are updates to things that you are following.

To see your notifications, just click on the 'My Mumsnet' icon and select 'Notifications' from the drop down menu.

At the moment there are two types of notifications displayed within your feed:

Mentions on a thread. When a user types @YourUsername within a thread, you’ll receive a notification for each mention you receive.

Updates to a thread you are watching. These will be aggregated by thread, so if there are 10 new posts on a thread you have been watching you will receive one notification for that thread. If you have email notifications switched on for mentions and ‘threads I’m watching’, you will still receive these via email too.

When you have clicked on a notification in your feed that notification will be marked as read.

If you have a lot of notifications and you want to dismiss them all, just click ‘mark all as read’.

Please be aware, you may not see this feature straight away as we are releasing this feature incrementally, but soon enough this should be available to all users.

Over time we’ll make improvements to the notifications feed, so we welcome any and all comments. Please leave your feedback and questions below.

MNHQ

Does anyone actually want it?

I said earlier that across the 4 or 5 threads in site stuff I'd only seen about 3 people say they liked it. I'm still however unusure why they liked it or how it's different from any of the features already available on the site.

Meh, I don’t mind either way, I think if I made a habit of scrolling through it i could get into the habit of using it. It’s just new is all.

I just don’t get the big deal.

@Bluntness100

I had a second red dot for my pm

Honestly they haven’t removed any functionality, it’s just an added feature, it’s a tiny red dot. If you don’t like it don’t use it, you can still use the site the way you used to.

It’s an added feature, use it or don’t, it doesn’t need to change how anyone uses the site, it’s all good,

No second red dot here!

Ok, so whoreofbabylon sent me a PM to test it.

On my screen (laptop browser) it just adds a number to the number of notifications.

That is REALLY ANNOYING.

Please mn can we have the PMs seperate from the general notifications? I don't want to constantly have to check if I have a PM

Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, and it was when I clicked on the red notifications button, I didn’t pay a lot of attention. 🤷‍♀️

I don't mind it, but I can see why other people think it's irritating. IMO/E, there are lots of people who hate the tyranny of the red dot, whether it be on their email icon or their Facebook notifications - and others who are happy to have the numbers up into their thousands!

But what I really don't like @JustineMumsnet @JanineMumsnet is not being able to distinguish between the notifications and PMs. You really need to separate these out if this feature is to be useful.

I’d agree with biwi there, I think the fact it’s red doesn’t help, green or white would be better

Suspect I clicked on the red dot and then saw another for a pm. As said I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.

It is very confusing because it looks like i have multiple PMs! How to distinguish between them? Also marking them as read doesn't delete them. I HATE IT!

If the red dot means notifications, I may not bother to check them - because I use TIO routinely as my way of 'starting' on MN whenever I log in.

Therefore I could be missing PMs by doing this, which wouldn't be great.

Suspect I clicked on the red dot and then saw another for a pm. As said I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.

Yes. I get a number and then have to click to see if it's threads or PMs. Then have to click again to get into either of them.

BIWI

But what I really don't like @JustineMumsnet* @JanineMumsnet is not being able to distinguish between the notifications and PMs. You really need to separate these out if this feature is to be useful.*

Yes! I agree with this. Seems really daft to lump them all together, not to mention really bloody annoying. If they were separate I’d just ignore them apart from PMs

The irony of getting increasingly annoyed by the notifications which are mounting up because I’ve watched this thread..

Does it only notify of watched threads & if someone "@"s you?

If so, then for me there really is no point!

@JustineMumsnet

I've now also noticed since this feature was switched on that I am not reliably receiving email notifications for PMs. It now seems about 50:50 as to whether I get an email or not.

This means if you decide to ignore the red dot for PM notifications because it's mixed in with thread notifications, you may still miss PMs using email notifications.

How come us plebs have got this when the Premium subscribers are supposed to get the new features first? Or is it just a cunning way of bombarding us with the 'Try Premium' advert?

@JustineMumsnet thanks for listening. I look forward to being able to turn off the notifications

Mine says 20+ so no hope of me clicking on it. I haven't got the time nor the headspace to look through those!

longpause you don't need to look at them unless you want to. Just click on notifications and then click on mark all as read and the red dot will go away.

I am doing that periodically until Mumsnet fix it as promised.

Just to let everyone know that we have released a fix for the issue where some users had said that if they choose to 'hide' a thread they had previously watched they were still getting notifications.

From now on if you hide a thread you should not receive a notification for it.

Hi @JanineMumsnet when I click "mark all as read", it doesn't work and the red dot thing is still there. Even when I refresh the screen it's still there.

I'm on Safari on a MacBook if that's any help?

Hmm. I'm not getting any notifications at all now!

@BIWI are you sure you’ve been tagged recently?

Ah yes! That will be why! Thank you @PurpleDaisies . I clearly misunderstood the whole thing ...

It’s ok, I had exactly the same thing happen half an hour ago!

I've just had a notification that a poster has mentioned me on a thread I'm on but the poster who is supposed to have mentioned me is not on the thread at all. Another poster has mentioned me on the thread in about the right timescale so I suspect this feature has just outed someone's namechange to me.

You should fix that.

User feedback:
Please install a "turn off notifications" option. It's beginning to annoy me so much I may de-reg.