I’m bringing bits and pieces from the article I wrote way back when to the forefront for people to discuss, but I feel like the notifications on the main site are very much in need of a revamp. As it is right now, you get notified for pretty much everything–people putting liking things, putting things in collections, you name it.
The thing is, I don’t really care when people do this. I can’t interact with these things in any way, so there’s no reason for me to want to see them (other than, perhaps, the little tingly feeling you get knowing your work is being noticed, but that gets old really quick).
On top of this, on the rare occasion that someone does comment on your work or share a make, it can get quickly washed away by other notifications that you don’t care about.
I think that notifications should be sortable by category, and there should be a setting to ignore certain types of notifications entirely.
And on top of that, the only way to clear your notifications is to permanently delete everything. So if you miss something and then clear everything, there’s no chance to happen to see it ever again.
As for direct message notifications, I can’t verify anything since it’s been forever since I have received a DM, but from memory, you have to open up your DMs folder in order to see notifications that you’ve gotten a message, which is not something I imagine most users tend to do. I set up email notifications for when people send me a message, but this sends me mail every time they reply as well, which is a bit frustrating.
Finally, I believe that there should be a separate place for system updates. The new team has come in and is presumably making changes and adding features, but I have to go digging in the forums to find them. It would be very handy to have a notification category (or more ideally, a popup from the notifications tab when changes have been made/features have been added) that lets me know what’s new.
Overall, the notifications feature could really use an overhaul, and I feel like opening a means of communication between the devs and users would be the first thing to do before working on other site features.