
Github: Notifications & Stars - telemachos
https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications-stars
======
akent
The per-organization email settings is actually the best news out of the bunch
- now I can stop checking my personal email so frequently at work.

I'm hoping this feature also fixes the long standing problem with github
commits via the web interface (merges and minor edits) using the wrong email
addresses in the permanent git history - which always seemed like a huge bug
to me.

UPDATE: Nope, it hasn't fixed that. Organization repos still use my default
personal email address in the logs even after changing the notification
routing.

~~~
swang
Don't you have to change it in your local git repo by running `git config
user.email <email>`?

~~~
akent
It works fine when I commit locally (as yes, it's just a normal old git repo)
- just via the web UI, it always uses the email in my github account marked as
'default' even though the repo obviously belongs to the organization, not to
me.

~~~
runejuhl
If you haven't already, you should notify the kind people at Github. They
respond within minutes, are friendly, and, most importantly, they actually
react on what you write them. Who'd have thought?

------
thirsteh
Loved the email:

"Hi friend,

We've made some REALLY BIG changes to the way that notifications work at
GitHub.

We're sending you this email because we love you. Also, the amount of email
you receive from GitHub notifications is going to change and we want to make
sure you don't miss anything important. First, check out the new notification
settings:

    
    
        https://github.com/settings/notifications
    

..."

------
sh1mmer
I'm surprised this took them so long.

I hope Github's new round means they are going to be more responsive to
customers. I like the company and the founders and team I know there, but it's
been frustrating to have to wait for features like this for months and months.

~~~
psylence519
Maybe someday we can attach images/docs to issues... I mean, why would you
ever want to attach an image to a site rendering issue when you can try and
describe it at length and still fail? Sigh.

~~~
andrewvc
Agreed. I've heard 'use dropbox' so many times here, and it's still shitty.

However, for the specific case of misrendered HTML skitch is def the best
option, even if your software supports attachments. So few clicks, totally
worth it.

~~~
stock_toaster
I use cloudapp with skitch. Drag from skitch to cloudapp icon, and it fills in
your paste buffer with the link.

------
kisielk
This is awesome. I think most users have been wanting a feature like this for
a long time.

One notable omission: There's no way to filter or search starred repositories.

~~~
bashbash
Not having the ability to search seems like a bit of an oversight, if I
remember correctly the previous "watch" list was on just one page so you could
use the browser to search by name. Now it's called "stars" and it's paginated
... not so easy.

~~~
kisielk
Previously the watched repos were displayed in a widget on your News Feed page
exactly like the current "Your Repositories" widget. It has a nice fast
filtering text box. The stars page desperately needs this back.

------
tterrace
They sent out what I thought was a very well done support email for this
feature:

 _Hi friend,

We've made some REALLY BIG changes to the way that notifications work at
GitHub.

We're sending you this email because we love you. Also, the amount of email
you receive from GitHub notifications is going to change and we want to make
sure you don't miss anything important. First, check out the new notification
settings:

    
    
        https://github.com/settings/notifications
    

You can configure which notifications are sent via email, and which email
address they're sent to (per organization!).

Which repositories do you receive notifications from? Any repository you're
watching. You can manage the list here:

    
    
        https://github.com/watching
    

Going forward this page will be the home base for understanding which
notifications you receive. You're automatically watching a bunch of
repositories based on your permissions — it's probably a good idea to go
through and unwatch repositories you're not interested in.

Check out our blog post to learn more about our new notification system, our
new stars feature and improvements to notification emails:

    
    
        https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications
    *

~~~
lamby
> what I thought was a very well done support email for this feature

Sure, it has the right details in it, but this kind of faux-friendly tone
comes across really transparent and off-putting to me.

~~~
MartinCron
I don't see the faux in it. It seemed pretty sincere to me, and I'm pretty
cynical.

GitHub is one of the companies that take deliberate effort to _make me really
them_ , from their clever 404 page, to little details such as this. Zappos is
another.

I'm wondering. Do lots of other people find this off-putting?

------
obilgic
2 buttons/actions(watch, star) and 2 different pages(dashboard,
notifications)?

Why not make it simpler but powerful by introducing better watch button (w
notifications and w/o notifications) and much better dashboard page?

~~~
stdbrouw
Because starring something and watching something are different things both
conceptually and in how people use these functions.

~~~
obilgic
They are not distinct enough to be 2 different actions. Especially having 2
totally different pages is a horrible thing(notifications and news feed) Why
not just combine 2 of them together and create more polished feed?

~~~
possibilistic
For now, I have to disagree. I only want to watch the libraries/projects that
are critical to what I'm building. This is a very small set of repositories. I
have wanted the ability to star interesting things for awhile.

This seems like it'll be great.

------
andrewingram
I like the change in notification behaviour, but now I'm missing the list of
watched (or now starred) repositories on the feed page that used to sit
underneath the list of my own.

I literally used this list numerous times everyday to get quick access to
certain repos, now I have to click the 'starred' tab to get a similar list
which means an extra page load.

------
kyt
I think this is a bad move and an example of feature creep. Were users really
asking for this? The problem was that the stream was overloaded with
irrelevant projects you may have watched on a whim. It seems like they solved
that with the notifications drop down. I'm not sure what the point of Starring
is.

~~~
technoweenie
Stars isn't a new feature, just a renamed one.

~~~
Rayne
How so? At first I thought it was a renamed 'watch', but since it doesn't put
any data in your timeline, I can't figure out what it is for at all. I mean,
it's a pretty button and all, but...

~~~
technoweenie
It is a renamed "watch."

------
splatterdash
My initial impression is it's a little confusing.

Getting to the starred lists and to the watched lists require a considerably
different navigation. (e.g. why is there a "Stars" tab beside the "Issues" tab
but no "Watch" tabs? Why are my own repos starred instead of watched?)

I hope they'll make it easier.

------
ericb
From their announcement email:

> We're sending you this email because we love you.

Anyone else reminded of "Welcome to Costco, I love you" from Idiocracy's
distopia? Intentional parody?

~~~
nja
I was reminded more of Dug: <http://youtu.be/ui9Mm63zpfE?hd=1>

------
hswolff
This is awesome! I made a Chrome Extension
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfhdalekdpifhlndhc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfhdalekdpifhlndhcdnjgjoefiajefc))
a few months ago that Stars has completely Sherlocked, but I'm happy for the
native support of bookmarking a repo.

Kudos Github!

Edit: Also looks like it broke my plugin. Hrm...need to fix that.

------
davidradcliffe
Finally! Per organization email routing is great too. Thanks!

------
gregwebs
I have been waiting for the stars feature for years. I want to switch all my
watched repos to stars.

I see there is an API for watching, but do I have to screen scrape to star a
repo now? <http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/watching/>

~~~
snprbob86
> I want to switch all my watched repos to stars.

It appears that happened automatically. Your watches list is now full of all
the things you used to implicitly get notifications about, which was not a
materialized list anywhere before.

------
craigc
GitHub, you should have made it so any repo that you had watched previously
remained watched AND starred.

It looks like everything is now starred but unwatched so no one will receive
any updates on the feed anymore unless they manually go through all their
repos and choose to watch them.

~~~
azylman
I think this is the behavior most people are going to prefer. It seems like
it's pretty general to use "watch" for what is now a "Star" (i.e. something
you find interesting but don't want updates from) so this will probably please
the most users.

~~~
craigc
I mean I totally agree. Being able to favorite something without getting
updates is great. I just think that changing the default behavior (aka coming
to the site one day and having nothing new in your feed) is a little bit
strange.

~~~
pooriaazimi
Strange, for you. A lot of us are unfortunately leechers (and there are more
of us than yours). We don't (sadly) participate in big- (or medium-) sized
projects and mostly do our own stuff and thus don't really care about specific
_commits_ in Node.js, homebrew or rails. When there's a new version we're
excited and will use them, but the internal and day to day operation and
progress of those projects are of little interest to us.

------
stock_toaster
Seems the new notification system impacted the news feed filtering of the
'switch account context'. I am now seeing lots of activity for organizations I
am a member of in my personal context. I guess this is a side effect of
'watching' those repos?

~~~
nnythm
I have also had this happen to me--I am part of a fairly large company on
github, so this means that suddenly I don't see anything in my strema except
for posts about that company, so I had to unwatch nearly everything in it,
which I would rather not have to do.

------
duaneb
I would really, really like per-file watching (or even finer granularity,
though I can't imagine the use) In collaborative environments, having github
tell you when something has changed without going through the commits yourself
would be cool.

~~~
pbiggar
That is a great feature idea. Maybe another way of doing it is to get an email
when someone touches code I touched last.

------
shiki
Excellent! I've been using watch for bookmarking interesting projects but I
didn't really want to see all their activities (commits). Stars solves this
problem. I think they're missing a search functionality for stars though.

------
Spiritus
They should make the star list more compact, and add a search filter to it.
And move it back to where watched repos was before.

Also, what happens to users you decide to "follow"?

------
reustle
Wow, that was fast! <https://twitter.com/reustle/status/232537914410668033>

~~~
zbowling
Little late to the game :-) I had a ticket in for this 2 years ago.

------
ricardobeat
That blue notification alert should be next to the user name/toolbar.

Questions:

\- All my own repos are now "Starred" by me. Should I unstarr them?

\- Why can't I watch a repo from the Starred list?

\- Whats up with the "Watch + Ignore" setting, isn't that exactly what Star
is?

~~~
Aqua_Geek
> \- All my own repos are now "Starred" by me. Should I unstarr them?

Probably. I view stars as bookmarks; there's no need to bookmark your own
repos (and not really any added benefit, unless you have hoards of repos).

------
uncoder0
Was there a warning about this update? I heard about 10 minutes of commotion
in our office due to this update. Mostly surprise at the timing which was the
middle of the work day on a Monday.

~~~
psylence519
I don't think Github follows an enterprisey deploy on Saturday night kinda
thing... If it's ready, push it.

~~~
uncoder0
Me either but I would have appreciated it since it is probably the most used
3rd party service for our company. We will be moving to their enterprise setup
in the near future anyway so it should not be an issue for us going forward.

------
snprbob86
Cool! Been waiting for this for a while.

Now, I'll continue waiting for <https://gist.github.com/> to get the updated
header :-)

------
Randgalt
This change is only slightly better than the previous implementation. What we
(and most I know) need is per-repo settings. Our organization has nearly 20
repos.

------
pwelch
These are awesome updates. A few days ago I was complaining about not being
able to direct organization repos to specific emails.

Great update Github!

------
apendleton
The post doesn't say actually ever say what "starring" does, other than put it
in the list of things I have starred. Is that it?

~~~
mcrittenden
As far as I can tell that's it. It's basically just a bookmark so you can find
it later without it clogging up your news feed.

------
reeze_xia
I like the feature. I've watch really a lot of projects. but I really didn't
want every feed show up in my timeline.

------
stigi
This is a life saver. No more huge Gmail filters! GitHub I salut you!

