forums [Suggestion] More Specific Notification Wording

i dont think notifications are specific enough. rather than saying that someone did something or other in a forum message, why not just say that you were mentioned/quoted in *INSERT THREAD TITLE HERE*? saves me the hassle of opening a bunch of threads, only to realise i just replied to them a few seconds ago.

not really. currently, a lot of notifications take up two lines instead of one, because the users making those mentions or quotes have long names. this generally makes the last word or two (ie. 'forum message') on offending notifications jump down to the next line, leaving a lot of white space. replacing 'forum message' with the name of the thread in question should still take up no more than two lines. a limiting feature could be placed on it if need be, to a maximum of xx characters, but i dont think thats necsesary.

quote hiigaran

i dont think notifications are specific enough. rather than saying that someone did something or other in a forum message, why not just say that you were mentioned/quoted in *INSERT THREAD TITLE HERE*? saves me the hassle of opening a bunch of threads, only to realise i just replied to them a few seconds ago.

I thought the direct link to the post you were quoted or mentioned in already did that?

The situation you described, hiigaran, should not happen to anyone. I highly doubt that it actually happens to you.

Now that I've notified you, are you going to reply, then immediately forget what thread this was and navigate to it again to check for recent replies? I think not.

If this is not what you meant, then you are making even less sense. Not even before the notification system was introduced did we have this problem. Not once did I reply to a thread without knowing what the thread was.

Why exactly do you find yourself opening a bunch of threads that you've just posted in? After I post this, I can't think of any reason I would open this thread again expecting something new.

The best I can figure is that you'll follow a notification, and completely ignore the thread title, and just respond to the linked post, apparently requiring no context regarding what the thread is about.

Kaiba
Say you have four notifications. You open the first one, go to the thread, read through the posts, reply to the thread, whatever. Now, you open the second notification, and the notification came from a different person in the same thread. You have already read through that thread so following that notification is a waste of time (which can be prevented if you knew which thread the notifications were from). There is no way, currently, to tell if two+ notifications are in the same thread or not.

EDIT: Ninja'd.

quote

Erm. Are you saying you don't click the links? Because there certainly is a name to the thread if you follow the link.

thats the entire point of the suggestion...so that you dont have to click the links to see what thread you were notified in.

I don't have slow internet connection or have too many notifications so I open every of my notifications in a new tab. If it were duplicates I'll just close the tab. I don't think the suggestion is very useful but maybe a nice little tweak some time in the future.

I don't think we really need to be debating too heavily the potential usefulness of this proposed tweak. It would obviously be a little more user-friendly if people were given more information in notification messages such as the title of threads where the notification event occurred. That's a given.

As I understand it, the system is implemented in such a way right now that notification events aren't actually aware of what they are notifying about. They're limited to just knowing what type they are and nothing more about the context in which they appear. In order for a notification to retrieve a thread title from the topic to which the post belongs, additional processing would be required for every notification sent out which is probably the biggest concern with implementing this ahead of everything else, actually.