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

Can we have a decent android app? Like a proper app?

Can we have the option of 'threads I'm on' staying on the list longer, like in the old days?

Even if I wanted to use it to check new posts, once I’ve clicked twice there is no way to get off the page other than to use the back button.

(“I’m Watching” just requires one click).

How much extra storage are all these notifications taking up?

I really don't want this!

Speaking of the @ thing - it says under the text box '@ username to reply to someone directly', but doesn't spell out that every time you @ someone, unless they've disabled the function because they find it really annoying, they're going to get a notification email. I wonder if that would make people use it a bit more sparingly?

SoupDragon

I've removed all the "I'm watching" threads and I am still getting notifications.

I removed most of my Watched threads, except old ones that no-one is posting on, saved for reference. And gave up posting. So far the annoyance has stopped but am afraid to post now in case the damn thing starts up again.

@trappedsincesundaymorn

SoupDragon

I've removed all the "I'm watching" threads and I am still getting notifications.

I had 2 notifications from my one recent watched thread and that's it.

Maybe there is a delay? 🤷🏻‍♀️ I was only posting what had happened to me - all my notifications are for "watched" threads or "mentions" and as I only have one barely active watched thread I'm generally getting no notifications.

I don't mind it in principle (I quite like that older threads make an appearance). What I don't like is that I've lost the little bell for PMs, and the red catches my eye far too much. What I would do is:

1. Keep the PMs and their bell in place
2. Move the notification dot to the left-hand side (like a mirror), and make it blue and white.

You could also split out by posts and @s, maybe by putting @s atthe bottom left in green?

There's also something that annoyed me about getting back onto threads after clicking on it, but I can't think what. I'll come back!

This has been driving me mad all week. I'm one of those people who can't leave things unread (email, messages etc.) so this is driving me crazy! It's going to put me off commenting on threads. Please can I turn it off.

Oh I know — when you click on a thread it then moved it to the top of your notifications with the time you read it, and your unread ones get moved down.

I know I've read it because I read it, and it's turned grey. Surely it makes more sense to have unread notifications at the top?

I've deleted all my watched threads and that's helped a lot - its not all the time now just when someone mentions me. Though can't wait for the opt out and it was driving me nuts.

Hi @JustHereWithMyPopcorn just popping in to let you know that there is a 'mark all as read' option at the top of the page, which saves you doing them all individually. Thanks for all the feedback here which we'll look into.

It doesn't bother me, I can tune it out, but essentially if you have contributed to more than a couple of active threads it's going to be 20+

Mine is probably up to a few thousand already.

@soniamumsnet

Hi *@JustHereWithMyPopcorn* just popping in to let you know that there is a 'mark all as read' option at the top of the page, which saves you doing them all individually. Thanks for all the feedback here which we'll look into.

Thanks @soniamumsnet I have seen that but it still means I have to go in there and go to the notifications and mark it as read. Seeing the red thing at the top of my page every time someone comments is compelling and, while I know this is my issue, i don't like it. A switch off notifications thing would be fab for people like me with control issues!

Thanks for that perspective @JustHereWithMyPopcorn.

I like it but surprised at the number of people who dislike it (haven't been on here for years). It is a pretty standard feature of most sites, a way of catching up quickly on threads (you are interested in).

It would be more useful, if PMs and @'s were highlighted separately/differently. The notifications could be split into 2, with users choosing what they would like highlighted. These could go to the top of the notifications (regardless of the time they happen) and all the other notifications (such x 20 people have posted in a thread you are watching) could be greyed out/below the highlighted ones. That would enable users to easily (and quickly) read the notifications that are important to them, and if they wanted to (or had the time) they could read the others.

Still not working on my laptop using Firefox, the ad means notifications and messages not clickable

Hi @soniamumsnet @JanineMumsnet @JustscreamMumsnet I've mentioned this several time but it's been ignored - the "mark all as read" option doesn't work properly on Safari. I just had to click it five times to get it to mark all my notifications as read. Refreshing the page didn't make a difference.

If it has lots of bugs, can you not just switch it off completely until it's sorted out?

@vanillandhoney thanks for flagging this. We will look into this now.

@vanillandhoney I just wanted to check, are you using desktop or mobile? If it's mobile, what device are you using?

@Noflora

Still not working on my laptop using Firefox, the ad means notifications and messages not clickable

Thanks for flagging this @Noflora we will hopefully have a fix for this shortly

[quote JanineMumsnet]@vanillandhoney I just wanted to check, are you using desktop or mobile? If it's mobile, what device are you using?[/quote]
I'm on a MacBook laptop - just using the latest Safari browser on there. They do go away eventually but I'm finding I need to click "mark all as read" about five times before it registers!

So just how broken does it need to be before you admit it was a poor idea, badly implemented?