General Alert Preferences

[Husk]

I was wondering how most people deal with alerts/notifications. Do you like them to be on the site alone? Push notifications? Browser?

 

[Arantor]

I find it varies very heavily with the site and how I interact with it.

For sites I care about but don't actively keep up with, I want emails - they're slightly more sticky than push notifications.
For sites I care actively about (e.g. at least weekly visits), I want notifications on the site, not push notifications.

I am aware I am not most people in that I'm reasonably happy to proactively check sites I care about for updates. My experience is that many people like push notifications particularly if they're consuming content on their phone but that it's slightly less important if they're going to spend any serious effort responding (e.g. if you're going to put in 500+ word responses, push notifications is generally less interesting)

Note that push notifications requires either the hurdle of an actual app in a lot of cases, or getting people to pin the site to their device in the form of a PWA which has shown to confuse users/be a reasonably high friction exercise because it's not how people are currently used to interacting with a site and especially on Apple has some issues if you're a Chrome user.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I usually never have notifications on, the only time I have push notifications on is when I'm in a Discord server/Guilded server and I'm busy doing something else and have the client minimized.

 

[Cory]

Admin Junkies is the only site I use for push notifications on my phone, well just badges that is. Otherwise, in all other forums I use I've always used in-forum alerts.

 

[Empire]

I have them off for most cases however I do have DM's with alerts and also those topics that I follow that I get alerts - I keep emails down also as I do not want to get emails every 6mins of the day when posts are made hahahah

 

[Cedric]

For any website but AJ: on forum notifications only. And I usually disable annoying ones like daily credits, etc. What I also dislike is people that spam notifications or PM, it's annoying.

For AJ, the notifications on the forum are sufficient for me. But I do have the Discord channel informing me of ANY post and thread happening on the forum at all times. It's helpful to combat spam quickly. And to see who's engaging.