Hi, all! About a week ago, the site went through some routine maintenance and updates, and, as you may have noticed, there were some changes made to the "Notifications" area of member profiles. These changes were relatively small, but I wanted to give you a full explanation of them nonetheless.
I strongly encourage everyone to read the entirety of this post and to then check your "Notifications" settings to be sure you have them set exactly as you want.
As you hopefully know by now, the "Notifications" area controls the instant notices you get from various parts of the site (blog, clips, forums, etc.) via email and also via onsite alerts. Onsite alerts, when they arise, show up as a number in a red circle near your member profile avatar in the upper right of the site (in standard laptop viewing mode). Just click on that number, and a dropdown menu will appear that guides you to your onsite alerts.
For instance, since I started writing this post, I got four alerts that I need to check:
But, before I do that, let me finish this post! 
In the past, prior to the recent update, you could control your email notifications independently of your alerts, meaning that, if you wanted, you could select to receive some types of instant notices via email and other types via alerts. The two sets of notices did not need to contain the same things. Some of Hoop.la's customers didn't like the complexity of this interface, and so the recent update simplified the interface. (BTW, Hoop.la is the team that supports all tech aspects of this site and the other sites that ride this same platform.)
In summary, here's what's changed:
(1) Now, emails and alerts (if you opt to get both) must contain the same notices.
(2) But, you have many more options for alerts than you had in the past - the same number as you have for email notifications!
And, how do you now manage these instant email notices and onsite alerts? Basically, in a fashion very similar to before:
(1) Select "Notifications" in the dropdown menu that appears under your member profile avatar in the upper right of the site.
(2) You'll then be taken to a new "Notification Settings" landing page (see screen shot below), and the first "Settings" tab will be open. Under "Instant Notification Delivery Methods", select whether you want to receive email notifications or onsite alerts, or both. Both will be toggled "on" by default when you first enter this area, but either or both can also be toggled off. Only select "Suspend All Email Notifications" under "Miscellaneous" if you don't want to receive any email notices from any areas of the site. If you select it, it will override your email setting under "Instant Notification Delivery Methods". PLEASE NOTE: I do NOT recommend suspending all email notifications, because you will likely miss important messages, such as this one, from the site. And, as you will see in Step (3), you have a lot of control over the types (and, thus, quantity) of notices you get from various parts of the site without having to take the extreme measure of stopping all emails.
(3) Lastly, select the second "Primary Notifications" tab at the top of the page, and you will be taken to the page where you can select precisely the content you want to get instant messages about (i.e., likes or comments on your clips, new blog posts, new clips, etc.). The image below is just a partial screen shot of all of the options, so be sure to scroll to the very bottom of the page on your computer to see everything available to you. Remember: Whatever options you select here will be sent to you as both an instant email notice AND an onsite alert IF you checked BOTH of these boxes on the previous page. If you uncheck any one of these boxes, you will get none of the things you've checked on the "Primary Notifications" page via that delivery method. PLEASE NOTE: The recent site update did not alter your past email notice settings in this area. It only toggled the email and onsite alert options in "Settings" into an "on" position. If you had previously set up an email notice for anything on the "Primary Notifications" page, then you are now also getting that notice as an alert.
And that's all she wrote, folks! If you have any questions about this update, please leave them below so all can benefit from my answers to your questions. And, again, I highly recommend that you visit your "Notifications" area very soon to make sure everything is set up as you like. Your email notices should be set as they were before, but you may find you are receiving more or fewer alerts than before, depending on how you had previously set your alerts.
ADDENDUM, SEPTEMBER 4, 2017
Also, since many of you are now more tuned into your alerts since the above announcement, here are a few other things you should know about how your "Alerts" page works:
1) Alerts cannot be manually deleted from your "Alerts" page. (Although your private messages can be deleted, but that's another story . . .) I've suggested to the site support team that they add this functionality, but so far they have not committed to do so.
2) Alerts will only display in the order they were created, with the most recent ones displaying first.
3) Whether read or unread, alerts drop off the list after seven (7) days. If you have a large number of alerts to display, then pagination links will display at the bottom of the page to allow you to see them all. But, again, if you don't look at your alerts for over a week, you will miss some, because they automatically drop off (disappear) at that time.
Comments (8)