Over in the More aggressive email alerts, it was brought up that the notification was not reliable enough for some. (It's not the first time someone's expressed that).
I have a set of interrelated recommendations that I think will increase the reliability of our notification system on-site and in emails. I'd appreciate your comments on them: will this help you, and do you need more?
- In a connected chat/rp, the inbox will light up if there's content in it. Have light up for every page. Also on every page, reset its appearance after we've emptied the inbox. Also on every page, include that red number we get in the page's favicon when there's an inbox message, and clear that when it's done.
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Put an inbox indicator down the bottom here next to the entry for feedback, chats, or roleplays, so that we can see if something comes up while we're busy typing. Most of the time the most interesting stuff is at the bottom of a page, but alerts are only at the top, which is a problem. Stack Exchange Chat handles this bottom-of-the-page alert by putting a vividly coloured circle with a number (representing the # of notifications) overlapping the to left corner of your input. We could have that, or a small (1 message in your inbox) link next to or below our avatar in the bottom right. Even if we miss the toast, we'll see this on the page.
- However this only works on some of the site pages, and not on e.g. profile editing. On other pages, we should probably have another alert solution, such as something that sticks to the side/top/bottom of the screen saying "1 notification".
- Notifications about new messages (i.e. all of the above mentioned) should have an ostentatious, attention-grabbing appearance. Right now it lights up with the link colour. That colour was chosen because it makes something clearly a link, and also not grab your attention or distract you too much from the rest of our text. The inbox notifications are alerts, they should be attention-grabbing and distracting. None of us want to miss them. That red number in the favicon is a good example of something ostentatious, it's hard to miss (except for that it's in a tiny icon).
- Do give the inbox notifications a counter of how many messages are waiting for us right here on the page, just like that red number in the favicon, so we can see if it suddenly goes up. If there's no notifications, don't display the number (don't just display a 0) — the fact it's there at all should grab our attention. (That means also give that number an ostentatious appearance.)
- If we haven't checked a notification in ~2 minutes, send us an email. (If we're not online at all, send the email immediately.) That way it's not so much about whether we're online, it's about whether we've seen or will see it. If we haven't seen it with all of this stuff present, fall back on emails. (Optionally only do this for priority personal communications, like PMs and roleplays, but I think that only leaves out feedback notifications and we might as well be consistent with the remaining 1/3 of notification causes.)
You can refer to these by number safely — if any get removed I'll replace them with a (removed) so the numbering stays the same.