WordPress.org Notifications
Discussions can happen anywhere across the WordPress.org ecosystem. Sometimes it can be difficult to know when you’re mentioned in a conversation or to discover when discussions break out about topics of interest to you. For those reasons we’d like to announce the availability of the WordPress.org Notifications system.
With Notifications, an email is sent to you anytime your WordPress.org username is directly mentioned using the @username syntax. Via the feature’s admin page you can also specify additional search strings that if mentioned by someone would also send a notification to you about that post or comment. The notification emails include a link back to the original content, the name of the person who made the mention, and a copy of the original content.
Notifications are currently enabled for the support forums and all of the make.wordpress.org P2s. All such forum posts, blog posts, and comments are checked for mentions and search terms.
You can access the admin page for the feature via the “Notifications” link that appears on your WordPress.org profile page at http://profiles.wordpress.org/USERNAME (where “USERNAME” is your WordPress.org account name). You must be logged into your account in order to see and access the link.
Of course, if you’d rather not receive any notifications you have the option to opt out via the aforementioned Notifications admin page.
We hope the new feature will not only help foster more discussions, but also more timely and active discussions.
PS – Just a heads up: a comment or forum post you make won’t trigger a notification to yourself.
Ben Tremblay 6:20 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
Brilliant. Foundational.
This sort of thing will heal some of the fragmentation we’re seeing!
Adam W. Warner 6:26 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
This is great and will be a huge enhancement for users, well done!
Might I suggest inserting an akert nag at the top of forums to let people know of this new feature and how to reference others with the @user name, etc? I think doing this will go a long way in getting more users to.adopt it quicker…
Adam
Brandon Kraft 6:41 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
A notification for a plugin developer when a support post is made referencing their plugin would be an awesome next step.
This is a great.
Otto 8:46 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
We already have that. Go to your plugin’s page, click the Support tab, scroll down to the bottom. Look for the “Subscribe to Emails for this Plugin” link.
Brandon Kraft 12:59 am on August 5, 2012 Permalink
I thought it was odd that it wasn’t there, seemed too obvious to not already have. Of course, it was simply the oddity was with me. Thanks for correcting me.
Dominik Schilling (ocean90) 6:45 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
Nice idea, but this seems to be misplaced: http://cl.ly/IX1O
Scott Reilly 7:12 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
Thanks for catching that. Should be fixed now.
Edward Caissie 6:50 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
Great Idea! I thought that “Notifications” link was new this morning … now I don’t feel bad about not noticing it sooner *grin*.
jdingman 8:18 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
Great feature! Can’t wait to see more timely responses from people
Matt Mullenweg 9:02 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
Love it, I’ll announce in the developer track upstairs that people can check it out.
WordPress.org Announces Notifications 10:15 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
[...] an @username to yourself will not trigger a notification, rather only when other users do it.via make.wordpress.orgTagged: WordPress.orgTweet WordPress.com Announces a new REST APIWhat are your thoughts? Cancel [...]
Alex Mills (Viper007Bond) 10:39 pm on August 4, 2012 Permalink
Most excellent, @coffee2code!
Ross Hanney 9:21 am on August 5, 2012 Permalink
This is awesome. I just received a notification for a support forum thread that I would probably never have seen otherwise, and was able to resolve it in a few minutes. Great stuff!
Marcus 1:15 pm on August 6, 2012 Permalink
a great little feature, v.useful!
a minor useability problem, i can see this happening for me and I’d guess others – e.g. my username is @netweblogic yet I go by Marcus, on the forum, anyone that writes to me writes @marcus so the wrong user will receive the email.
A workaround to this could be to add an @…. line next to each avatar below the user, similar to what BuddyPress has. Not ideal hopefully intuitive enough to reduce this from happening.
Andy Skelton 4:46 pm on August 8, 2012 Permalink
Ditto. This has happened to me. The informal use of @Andy should be gently discouraged. Some possibilities:
Sergey Biryukov 7:25 pm on August 6, 2012 Permalink
Sounds cool! Some issues I’ve found:
1. “The default is value is the notification search string” — the first “is” looks like a typo.
2. The actual default value seems to be an empty string.
3. UTF-8 is not supported? http://i48.tinypic.com/2uegv3m.jpg
Scott Reilly 5:40 pm on August 14, 2012 Permalink
Thanks for reporting, Sergey. (1.) was definitely a typo, but after the less than clear wording that prompted (2.), I reworded the text. If the “Notification Name” field is not defined, then the “Notification Search String” gets used (but not phrased to suggest that it would be set as the default value). If not explicitly defined, the field remains an empty string.
As for (3.), UTF-8 support has also been added. Let me know if you encounter any issues on that front.