[BUG] Notifications not working on subscribed posts

[maxfloden]

Fider Cloud or Self Hosted
Fider Cloud

Describe the bug
Notifications not working as expected, ie I do not receive notifications on threads I am subscribed to.
I have only seen this bug with new comments to post. Status change seem to trigger notification. See examples below.

To Reproduce
Subscribe to post and wait for someone else to comment, see if you got a notification or not

Expected behavior
If it says on a post that I subscribe to it ("You’re receiving notifications about activity on this post."), I expect to get notifications when there is a new comment on the post or other activity

Screenshots
N/A

Additional context

1. Example, posted by me, 3 comments (two by me), no notifications
   https://feedback.fider.io/posts/373/allow-html-in-welcome-message

2. Example, I commented on existing post, subscribed, new comment was added by another user (Guilherme) but no notification
   https://feedback.fider.io/posts/8/translate-fider-to-other-languages-internationalization-i18n

3. This is what I see on my notifications page.
   I have received only one notification which is for another post than the two examples above, it is also a status change not a new comment. I have never received any notifications by email.
   Notifications
   Stay up to date with what's happening
   Unread
   No unread notifications.
   Read on last 30 days.
   Guilherme Oenning changed status of Moderate the posts before making it live on the forum to duplicate
   2 days ago

[maxfloden]

Related #878 #879

[indyteo]

It work well for me, are you sure you enabled notification about discussion in your settings page?

They are not enabled by default and this is the expected behavior.
You may what to submit a feature request instead of a bug report, but @goenning stated he did it like that to prevent most of users from getting unwanted notifications.

As he suggested in the pull request you mentioned, a "subscribe" checkbox when commenting on posts you're not yet subscribed would be a good idea.

[maxfloden]

No I did not change any settings, my default is still off.
But I still would expect to see notifications on the notifications page.
In settings I, maybe wrongly, interpret "web" as in-browser notifications? (Ie NOT yes/no to show on notifications page)

I would like to keep this open as a bug because if I as a user see "You’re receiving notifications about activity on this post.", I would expect to get notifications.

This is what I suggest to fix this:
1: Always show notifications on the notifications page. (I don't see any reason to be able to turn these on or off?)
2: Add info that you need to go into settings to turn web/email notifications on, preferably on the post page. For example in addition to "You’re receiving notifications about activity on this post." add text "Email notifications are turned off by default, you can change this in your profile settings"

Item 1 imho is a necessary bug fix, item 2 is more of a feature request

[indyteo]

I disagree about your first point.
I as a user don't care about activity on posts that I didn't interacted with. I don't want to get my notification zone filled out with those unwanted stuff, so we must need to be able to turn off notifications. And they must be turned off by default. However I agree about your second point which is a necessary bug fix (only show the message when user has enabled global "Discussion" notification, and otherwise the link to the settings page)

In-browser notifications would be an extra addition but I don't know what are the conditions to get them (we must have a tab with Fider opened?)

[goenning]

We once had email notifications enabled by default for comments. But we had to disable because of an high number of complaints stating that it was spam and they never subscribed to that content.

I'd like to turn this back on, but I see two improvements we need to do first:

1. ask the user if they want to subscribe or not when leaving a comment. It's not widely known that a comment will automatically subscribe to it.
2. the unsubscribe link on the email should take the user to a very simple page with a single "Unsubscribe" button that should work even if they are not signed in. The current link takes them to the post page where they have to search for the button (which is only visible if they are signed in).

The current behaviour is that you get web notifications for posts that you commented on. If you want email as well, then you'd have to change your preferences.

The web notifications is not the browser native notification, it's just that bell icon at the top.

[maxfloden]

I think while waiting for the improvements you suggest, it would be very a quick temp fix to just add this simple text as I suggested above:

2: Add info that you need to go into settings to turn web/email notifications on, preferably on the post page. For example in addition to "You’re receiving notifications about activity on this post." add text "Email notifications are turned off by default, you can change this in your profile settings"

(Btw web notifications should be on by default imho)