Suggestion: alternative display for notifications page under profile

H3Knuckles

Cross-posted (with edits) from another thread:

H3Knuckles wrote: »

I've seriously considered taking the Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm threads off my bookmarks because they're like 90% of the notifications I get.

I kind of wish notifications worked sort of like how a lot of e-mail clients group your inbox into 'conversations'. Like, it'd show the latest update to each private conversation or thread you have bookmarked, sorting them in chronological order of most recently updated, and then you could expand any given notice thread to see all the individual notifications it's gotten since you last checked in.

Let me know if that description isn't clear. Is this something Vanilla could do?

Edit: Please see my post below (third in the thread) for a better explanation.

Straightzi

You can disable notifications for bookmarked threads - would that fix your problem?

H3Knuckles

I mean, it'd solve the problem of those two threads kicking notifications for anything else off the page. But I bookmark threads because I want to receive notifications for them. For example; I don't need to see how many times the Overwatch thread has updated since I last checked in; just that it has updated. I'm following about a dozen threads, and because some threads update so much faster than others, the slower ones' update notifications can be pushed several pages back, such that I end up missing that the slower thread has had an update at all.

Part of the problem for this is that when you are browsing the page in question (at https://forums.penny-arcade.com/profile/notifications), there's no distinction between new and old notifications in the layout beyond the sort order. It doesn't even number them so you can't just read "there's 63 notifications", page back to #63 (the oldest fresh one) and work back from there.

My point was to suggest a way of organizing the notifications page so that it would group all the notifications for a given thread or PM conversation together and only display the latest of each, with clickable arrows to expand any given notification thread to show each individual update for it. That way you'd still receive notifications for all the threads you want to follow, without the busier threads pushing the slower moving ones off the front page. This is inspired by how Google's gmail browser client organizes e-mail into 'conversations'.

Tube

We don't have any ability to change Vanilla features like that.

H3Knuckles

Tube wrote: »

We don't have any ability to change Vanilla features like that.

Sorry, I knew the PA Forums staff couldn't, but I'm sure I've seen Vanilla peeps respond to threads in this section before, so I thought it'd be okay to post this here. Could you point me towards a better place to submit it to them?

Edit: I went to the Vanilla website using the link at the bottom of every page, but the only forum I could find there was to support clients, so I'm not sure where else this could go.

kime

I've mentioned in the other thread, but any reason you don't just use http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussions/bookmarked to view your bookmarks?

Tube

H3Knuckles wrote: »

Tube wrote: »

We don't have any ability to change Vanilla features like that.

Sorry, I knew the PA Forums staff couldn't, but I'm sure I've seen Vanilla peeps respond to threads in this section before, so I thought it'd be okay to post this here. Could you point me towards a better place to submit it to them?

Edit: I went to the Vanilla website using the link at the bottom of every page, but the only forum I could find there was to support clients, so I'm not sure where else this could go.

There isn't really anywhere I'm afraid. They don't provide support to end users.

SmokeStacks

H3Knuckles wrote: »

I don't need to see how many times the Overwatch thread has updated since I last checked in; just that it has updated.

It sucks that this isn't a normal feature. I follow some threads that are fairly slow and only update when some new piece of news is released, so it would be nice to have a "There are new posts in [THREAD]" notification as opposed to just seeing twenty new notifications because each post sends me a ping. I wonder what the technical reasoning is behind it.

Smasher

SmokeStacks wrote: »

H3Knuckles wrote: »

I don't need to see how many times the Overwatch thread has updated since I last checked in; just that it has updated.

It sucks that this isn't a normal feature. I follow some threads that are fairly slow and only update when some new piece of news is released, so it would be nice to have a "There are new posts in [THREAD]" notification as opposed to just seeing twenty new notifications because each post sends me a ping. I wonder what the technical reasoning is behind it.

The Bookmarks view Kime mentioned seems like the perfect answer for what you guys want, showing all your bookmarked threads in one place. Threads are sorted by their most recent post, and threads with new posts are shown in blue while threads with no new posts are grayed out.

That view is actually my primary means of browsing the forums, with me occasionally looking through the normal sub-forums to find new threads I might be interested in.

H3Knuckles

kime wrote: »

I've mentioned in the other thread, but any reason you don't just use http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussions/bookmarked to view your bookmarks?

Because somehow I'd never stumbled across that page before. Thanks man!