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Feature request: Disable all email notifications temporarily / scheduled

By Christian Scheuer @chrscheuer
    2020-07-30 18:02:06.998Z

    I often end up receiving 50-100 emails from Talkyard every day (or at least it feels that way). This is great because I get an email notification on my phone as soon as a user has sent a reply somewhere that I need to check.

    However, due to the sheer number of messages, I often need to go "offline" for a bit while doing other work. While I'm doing such other work, I would like to still get notifications on emails on my phone - but not from Talkyard.
    Right now, to allow myself some time away from the forum, I need to disable all notifications on my phone. This means I might lose important emails coming from other sources.

    It would be extremely helpful if there was a "Snooze" or "Go to Away mode" / "Go to online mode" set of buttons in Talkyard so I could say, for example, Snooze email notifications from TY in 4 hours, or until next morning at 9am, or until I manually re-enable them.

    Would something like that be fairly easy to add? It would definitely help me a lot :)

    • 15 replies
    1. The quickest & simplest fix, is, I'd think, to add a "Snooze notifications" button in one's username menu — just to the right of "View all notifications".
      That button would open a dialog: "Snooze for how many hours?" and you'd type a number,
      maybe could default to whatever you typed the last time.

      Some time later, there could be a Snooze Schedule, say, snooze on weekends and between 1700 – 0800 for example.

      When snooze ends, would you want all emails at once, in one (or a few) emails?
      Or one emal per notification?
      Or visit the Talkyard forum yourself and reply via the notifciations page?

      Anyway I like this topic. At HackerNews, I've seen fairly many discussions about Slack and how annoying "always on" instant notifications can be.

      ***

      I've wondered about optionally letting @username and new topics not trigger instant notifications.
      Instead, one could configure one's profile, so such notifications got emailed, or pushed to one's phone, about once per hour
      or every 4 hours or whatever.

      But if someone typed @@username — that'd generate an instant notification, if from a somewhat trusted user (e.g. co-worker, configurable).
      Or maybe @username! or !@username. This could be made discoverable, by including something about this in the username select dropdown.

      1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
          2020-08-01 10:44:19.281Z

          Thanks for considering this!

          I don't agree with the 2nd part about letting the sender/tagger of posts determine whether or not a notification should be sent. IMO this should be fully configurable by the user receiving notifications.
          We run a large and growing community where policies around how users should properly use the system is already extremely hard to get people to follow. If anybody can override my personal notification settings with some syntax, then I'd lose all the power of choosing when to receive them.

          I really like the Snooze email notifications idea as a first step. But, to be clear. I still want the notifications to be listed in the notifications dropdown in the forum. I just don't want the emails.
          This way, the next morning, or whenever I decide to turn email notifications back on, I can just go to the forum to catch up, since the notifications are still there. I just didn't receive any emails during the Snooze.
          This also means, there's less need for me to receive a summary email from what happened while I was snoozing. If you'd send an email, I'd definitely prefer a summary over all of a sudden receiving 10's of emails all at once.
          Preferably, whether or not to receive a summary email when Snooze ends should be configurable. I can easily imagine that I'd be turning that off.

          I completely agree schedules is phase 2 of this. I could easily have schedules just by writing a little script that sends a Snooze request to your server every night for now.

          It would be imperative as part of phase 1 to include the option to manually end the snooze at any time. I think you should have these options when email notifications are ON:

          • Snooze for X hours
          • Snooze until tomorrow 9AM
          • Snooze until Monday 9AM
          • Snooze until I turn it back on.

          When they're OFF/Snoozed, it would read:

          "OFF" (or some icon with a line through, etc.)
          including text describing if they're indefinitely snoozed, or coming back at a certain time.
          Then you'd have the option to click

          • End snooze (or something like that, ie. turn back on now).
          1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
              2020-08-01 10:48:47.305Z

              This is how Snooze looks like in Intercom, which I use ALL the time.
              By the way - this is snoozing per thread/customer, which would also be interesting to have that kind of granularity at one point. But for now, a global Snooze would have a ton of value :)

              1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
                  2020-08-01 10:49:16.314Z

                  And this is Slack's

                  1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
                      2020-08-01 10:51:24.867Z

                      On this note... Is there already an option in Talkyard to receive Notifications (in the sense, notifications as they show up in the UI) but NOT receive emails for them?
                      I think I would even consider having email notifications generally off, so I have to open up the forum to check for new stuff. Like - constant snooze. I would definitely do that some days, just to be able to focus more.
                      But again I don't wanna turn all notifications off - just the emails. Because I still want to be able to use the dropdown to check what happened.

                      1. There isn't, not right now, but ought to be yes

                        Well soon if you Snooze for 999 999 hours that should have the same effect

                    • In reply tochrscheuer:

                      Sounds nice, I think I like the 9am mindset (and not, say, 07:30).

                      I'm adding snooze X hours, + snooze until tomorrow 9am, and until 9am 2 days & 9am 3 days ( = weekend), for now. + a turn-back-on button, and snooze-icon (so one knows that one is snoozing).

                      Per topic and per user / customer, seems like nice to have some time in the future, yes.

                      1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
                          2020-08-07 12:06:06.237Z

                          Wonderful!!!! Thank you :D

                          1. New snooze server now deployed to here, Ty .io. If you want to, you can try it out (don't know if maybe you'll have some feedback).

                            I didn't yet implement Get-a-summary-email when snooze auto-ends, though.

                            1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
                                2020-08-09 20:37:36.336Z

                                AWESOME! That was fast :) I've snoozed until 9 am tomorrow - feel free to answer this any time before if you want me to test if it works.
                                Really liking the UI/UX of it so far.

                                1. Pling. 08:10 in Sweden now, I think that's 50 min before 9am your time (?). Glad to hear the UI/UX works.

                                  1. @chrscheuer Pling, 13:51 here now. This ought to send you a notification email

                                    1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
                                        2020-08-10 11:57:24.830Z

                                        Yes!! It works :)

                                        1. Ok, good :- ) I just deployed to Prod, so now you can use Snooze also in your forum.

                                          1. CChristian Scheuer @chrscheuer
                                              2020-08-10 14:30:26.343Z

                                              Wonderful!! Thank you so much for the quick cycle.

                        • Progress
                          with doing this idea
                        • @KajMagnus marked this topic as Planned 2020-07-31 20:23:20.398Z.
                        • @KajMagnus marked this topic as Started 2020-08-06 11:43:06.331Z.
                        • C@chrscheuer marked this topic as Done 2020-10-19 16:12:06.349Z.