Multiple issues with notifications

[Jelena]

Notification functionality seems to have multiple issues today:

- some old notifications came back as "unread": I suddenly have notifications going back to May, even though just yesterday I marked all as read;

- notification links actually don't lead to the related posts, all of them point to the same people.sap.com link and just open your profile;

- the link and the text underneath are exactly the same, I'm assuming it's not intentional as it wouldn't make any sense;

- as shown above, & quot in the link, there was no such problem before.

P.S. Not a problem per se but previously notifications were showing "yesterday" or "2 days ago" instead of the date. That format was actually more helpful IMHO.

[TammyPowlas]

I also recommend emailing sapnetwork at sap dot com

I see this too: https://answers.sap.com/questions/12718071/right-click-and-opening-in-the-new-tab-not-working.html

[p244500]

I also got same issue today.

[former_member186338]

New design -> new issues! And as usual, nothing is tested before move to production!

Sorry for sarcasm ...

[former_member186338]

P.S. "notification links actually don't lead to the related posts, all of them point to the same people.sap.com link and just open your profile" - you have to click on the header, then you will see notification text with the link to question and then click on question link.

Extra click added - no idea what for!

[Jelena]

vadim.kalinin - thanks for cluing me in on that! Gee whiz... More clicks, just what we need.

[Jelena]

P.S. Not sure what' up with that but I don't see this question in the Content section in my profile. Not sure if this is populated via a daily batch job, haha, but bookmarking in browser just in case. Sheesh...

[tamira · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Old notifications coming back as unread: Some additional rules were introduced for notifications that results in new unread ones. The ones that were imported today and you marked yesterday as read have been migrated with the read status included.

Links not leading to related posts: Can you elaborate more please? The name leads to a profile, the comment to the comment link and the post title to the post itself.

Same title as text: previously notifications had a different setup, now they have subject+text, which will be rewritten in the upcoming weeks. Other than that for now we used the same text you would receive in an email, where the setup is also subject+text. The reason why the different setup was needed is because new type of notifications that will be onboarded require more space than a one liner.

& quot: we noticed that, it will be fixed on production tomorrow.

UPDATE:

We rolled out the following enhancements today:

- opening individual notifications in new tabs/windows is possible

- increased excerpt on main Inbox screen to 500 characters - fitting most of the notifications on the screen

- ability to click on links from the main Inbox screen without the need to do an extra click to read details of a single notification

- pagination retention in URL for Inbox (and all other profile pages with pagination)

- browser back button functioning for inbox navigation

- some notification text changes

Best,

Gabi

[former_member186338 · Accepted solution]

"The reason why the different setup was needed is because new type of notifications that will be onboarded require more space than a one liner." - I have no idea when multiline notification is required (some example?), but now each time I want to open notification link to some question I have to click twice ...

[Jelena · Accepted solution]

"Links not leading to related posts" - each notification has a link. Previously, a notification would say" so-and-so commented on your discussion <discussion title>". Here <discussion title> was a link, I could right-click on the link and open it in another tab. This would take me to the discussion where so-and-so commented. (And if I'm lucky, I could even get to the specific comment.)

Now I get a notification like this, link is highlighted in red:

So I tried as usual, right-click -> open in new tab and it opened... my dashboard. (Well, no surprise, really, as I said, the actual link appears as people.sap.com is I hover over it.)

Just reading Vadim's comment - it seems that the idea is that people don't do right-click and instead single-click to "open notification". Well, this opens notification but now I actually see more issues with such design:

- as Vadim said, it's an extra click, we should be able to get the post without doing an extra click to "open notification";

- UI in this case is very "mainframe-like": notification opens just by itself and takes up the whole screen. Couldn't it be just unrolled within the notification list on the same screen? Then the browser's Back button is not working correctly - it throws you to the content tab in the profile, not to the notification list. I guess that's why there has to be "Back" button on screen? Because the real Back button doesn't work? Is this the best design?

In the days I was active on SCN I could get a dozen notifications a day easily, not counting "so-and-so followed you", which I don't care for. Clicking on all of them one-by-one to answer would be very frustrating and unproductive.

At some point, there was the SCN advisory board that gave suggestions for UI based on how active contributors use it. That's how previous notification functionality was built, I could see most of our input incorporated eventually. Now it seems like back to square one to the design someone assumes is great.

[tamira · Accepted solution]

Updated my answer with the enhancements we made today.

In addition to that to reflect on your other comments:

- you can actually turn off some of the inbox notifications that you are not so interested in, so if you don't want to get informed about new followers for instance. See the Communication preferences in the Account&Settings menu.

- "unrolling" notification on the same screen: it was one of the three layouts that we tested, but it had conflicts with some of the previous comments of the advisory board e.g. about scrolling behavior

[former_member186338 · Accepted solution]

Yes, now it's possible in SOME cases to open comment in new tab directly from notification page! But it depends on the length of comment...

It's better to have the link at the beginning of notification text

[former_member186338 · Accepted solution]

Look on this screenshot:

First comment can be opened directly from list, second - not!

[tamira · Accepted solution]

Added link behind "comment" after the title, so is clickable for the new ones.

[maheshpalavalli · Accepted solution]

Gabriella Gogl-Gyorgy Ohh now it's a lot better 🙂

[Jelena · Accepted solution]

Hi Gabriella, since a change was made I'm going to close this post but it seems that now there are other issues. ("Old bugs fixed, new bugs added." 🙂 ) I opened a new question regarding those: https://answers.sap.com/questions/12720436/multiple-issues-with-notifications-part-2.html

Thank you!