Notifications

Notifications — Alerts on a phone — is the list of things other people did that involve you. The bell carries the number of unread ones, up to 99+.

The list Copy a link to this section

Things that belong together are shown as one row. Forty reactions to one post on one day is one line with a few faces on it and a count, not forty lines.

Looking at the list does not mark anything read. Opening a row does, along with everything grouped into it. Mark all read clears the lot.

Filters across the top: All, Mentions and replies, On your posts, People, Groups, Events, and From Easybie. The filter stays in the address, so you can bookmark one.

Some rows can be answered where they stand, without opening anything: a tag waiting for approval, a follow request, an invitation to a group, an invitation to an event, and somebody asking to join a group you run. An event offers Going and Can't go; interested lives on the event's own page, where there is room for it.

Under each row is a line or two of the post it is about — unless you are no longer allowed to see that post, in which case the row stays and the preview goes.

Read notifications are cleared out after 90 days, unread ones after a year. And if the person who caused a notification deletes their account, it goes with them.

Choosing what you are told about Copy a link to this section

Settings → Notifications. Everything saves as you touch it; there is no save button.

In your notifications list Copy a link to this section

The switches, all on to begin with: Mentions, Replies, Reactions, Reposts, Follows, Birthdays, Tags of you, Page invitations, Groups, Events and Pages you help run.

Turning one off means it is never recorded, not hidden. Switching it back on does not recover the week you missed.

Groups, Events and Pages you help run are one switch each rather than one for every kind of thing that happens inside them. Somebody who wants a room to stop making noise is not deciding whether a rule change is different from a role change.

Two things have no switch and will not get one. Anything a moderator does about your account — if that could be turned off, the way to make yourself unreportable would be to turn it off. And somebody asking to follow you, because that is not news, it is a queue: they are waiting outside a private account, and the notification is the only place you can see them.

Birthdays is the one that is not about something somebody did. On the morning of a birthday — your morning, in your own timezone, not theirs — you are told about people you follow whose day it is. Only those who have set their birthday and have let you see it, which is theirs to decide under Settings → Privacy. It never pushes to your phone, and these rows are cleared after two days rather than the ninety above: a line that says "today" stops being true the next morning.

By email Copy a link to this section

Nothing is emailed while you are reading Easybie. Once you have been away about ten minutes, the kinds you left on can reach you, and never more than one of each kind an hour.

Email me at all turns the whole column off. Below it: Mentions, Replies, Messages, Follows, Reports you made, Badge changes, Badge requests and News from Easybie. Moderators see one more, for reports waiting to be looked at.

Reactions and reposts are never emailed. They arrive in bulk, and an email for each one is how a mailbox learns to ignore us. They stay in your list.

Some things are sent whatever is set here — getting back into a locked account, finding out somebody else is in it, and decisions you may want to answer. The settings page lists them in full, under the email column. It is listed there rather than repeated here so the two cannot disagree, which is what they had been doing.

Being told on your device Copy a link to this section

Settings → Notifications → On this device, then Turn them on for this device.

Your browser will ask your permission. If you refuse, it will not ask again on its own — you can allow notifications for this site in the browser's settings, usually behind the icon at the left of the address bar.

It is per device and per browser. Turning it on on your laptop does nothing for your phone.

On an iPhone or iPad Copy a link to this section

Add Easybie to your Home Screen first. Apple only allows notifications from an app on the Home Screen — never from a Safari tab, at any version of iOS. Open the Share menu, choose Add to Home Screen, then open Easybie from the new icon and turn notifications on there.

This is Apple's rule rather than ours, and it is the same for every website. Until you do it, the switch will tell you this browser cannot do it, because in a tab it genuinely cannot.

What is actually sent Copy a link to this section

What travels through Google's, Mozilla's or Apple's push service is an empty knock: no name, no words, nothing about what happened. Your browser then asks Easybie what it was about, over your own signed-in session.

They learn that something is waiting for one anonymous address, and nothing else. Most sites send the notification's text through that service encrypted — encryption hides the words but not that somebody messaged you at two in the morning, and we would rather they did not know that either.

What to expect Copy a link to this section

• A push can take up to a minute to arrive, and is tried once. A lost one is simply lost; the notification is still on the site
• One banner per thing that happened. Two pushes about the same notification collapse into one; two different events stay two, because a second banner that silently replaced the first was how an afternoon of activity arrived as a single buzz about a single event
• Opening one takes you to your notifications, not to the particular post
• If your device is offline at that moment, all it can say is that something happened
• A direct message does push, and never appears in this list. Messages keep their own unread count, on the envelope and in the number on the app icon

Your lock screen will show who and what kind — "Maja replied to you". That is drawn by your own browser from your own session, but it is still on a screen other people can see.

Things that never notify you Copy a link to this section

• Somebody you have blocked, in either direction, and somebody you have muted. The exception is anything a moderator decides about your account, which reaches you regardless
• A second reaction on a post you were already told about and have already read
• Somebody mentioning you when your privacy settings do not let them — the mention still appears in their post, it just does not ring