Notifications for when a new thread is created

chemicalivory

Right now, threads have a discoverability problem. When a thread starts, if you're not replied to or mentioned when a thread is created, there is no way to be told that a thread was created. You have to discover the thread either by watching closely, or by accident. There needs to be a way to give that option of being notified to people who want it, without annoying people who don't want it.

In the notification settings for each channel, there's "All", "Mentions", or "Nothing", with an additional option for "Mute". These give us a couple different options for how to make this new notification work:

  1. New threads count as new messages. "All" notifies you when a new thread is created, "Mentions" doesn't.
  2. A new notification level is created. "All" gets renamed to "All Messages", and "All Messages And Threads" is added to the left of "All Messages". This gives a way to add the new notification without annoying people, but the UI is more complicated in exchange.
  3. A new toggle is added to the notification settings window, "Notify when a thread is created".

These each have pros and cons, and there may be other options I didn't think of.

Option 1 is conceptually the simplest, but it also doesn't offer any control over the notification behavior. Everyone has to simply live with it.

Option 2 is much more complex, but the complexity is rewarded with control.

Option 3 offers some of the control of Option 2, and might be good enough. It might be more confusing, or it might be easier to understand.

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Comments

2 comments

Date Votes
  • chemicalivory

    I definitely like the control Option 2 brings, so that's my preference.

    0
  • Phoenyx

    Another option would be having a toggle somewhere to autojoin all threads.  I'd love any of these, though :)

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