Updates to Communications Settings — to Reduce Duplication of Notifications

Depending on your settings within the communications area of your profile, you may have experienced multiple notifications for a single update. For example, if you had notifications turned on for both “Comments and answers to content I follow” and “Updates on my content,” you would receive two notifications when somebody posted a comment to your blog post (if you also happened to follow your post in order to receive notifications for when people commented on comments to your post).

We know this duplication has been a source of frustration for members, so we have retired those two notifications. In their place, we have introduced three new notification types, as shown below:

These notifications will allow you to more finely tune the type of updates you receive — for example, if you spend all of your time in Q&A, perhaps you aren’t interested in Coffee Corner and blogging content — while also eliminating the duplication of notifications that the “Comments and answers to content I follow” and “Updates on my content” options created. Whether it’s a comment or answer to content you follow or created, you’ll now only receive a single notification for each response. (The only time you might experience a duplicate is if somebody also happens to @mention you in the comment or answer, as that will also trigger the “Content I was mentioned in” notification.)

To ensure no disruption to members’ notifications, we turned on these three notifications by default for all accounts. If you find that you are now receiving notifications that you don’t want, however, you can turn them off, per your preference.

With this new update, we believe we can cut down the notifications noise in your inboxes, giving you a much better experience when trying to stay up to date with the community content that interests you most.