

GitHub Notiﬁcations: Stars, please - alanh
http://aggregated.alanhogan.com/post/817024089/github-notifications

======
kneath
We plan on eventually revisiting our Inbox in it's entirety. In the meantime,
I'd highly suggest using stars to fix the problem.

[http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/GitHub_Mail_-_Inbox_-
_ky...](http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/GitHub_Mail_-_Inbox_-
_kyle%40github.com-20100715-175516.jpg)

~~~
alanh
Awesome news.

(For those too lazy to click the link — he is suggesting using Gmail stars for
[notification] messages sent by GitHub.)

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mkelly
Can anyone enlighten me as to the notification he's receiving?

I'm only a light user of github, and 'git pull' and 'git log | less' have
always been all the 'notification' mechanism I've needed. I've not dealt with
other people wanting to edit the code without having full push access, though.

~~~
kneath
If you go to <https://github.com/account/notifications> you can see all the
notifications you receive. Here's a screencap in case you don't feel like
logging in:

[http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Notification_Center_-
_Gi...](http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Notification_Center_-
_GitHub-20100715-185547.jpg)

We send you an email and add a message to an inbox-like UI when each of these
vents happen.

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Groxx
Interesting... but I have to disagree. A lot of people would scream bloody-
murder if their notifications were automatically marked as read. And if stars
/ flags are the only organizational option, any power-user will quickly feel
the everything-bucket-migraine. Folders / tags are probably a better option
there, and would indeed be useful for power-users. By all means, that'd be a
useful addition, and can be ignored if one doesn't want to use it.

As to the auto-mark-as-read, and possibly _everything_ , how about a plugin?
I'm only familiar with Safari's API, but that has storage for settings / data
- you could just migrate things to be saved into there, and mark everything
automatically.

~~~
alanh
Good point regarding automatically marking as read.

Since there is already a “Mark as Read” button, automatically doing so would
not required for my ideal solution (as described in the link).

I have heard people describe notifications as “broken” for not auto-marking as
read, which is why I assumed it was desirable. (That, and since Facebook does
it this way, there is a very popular precedent and likely some broken
expectations among new GitHub users.)

Now regarding labels/folders… this is probably overkill IMO. That’s where
GitHub "issues" or various To-do managers, which do have labels, come in.

~~~
Groxx
I'm not familiar with the "issues"... I'm a very light GitHub user. So, a
couple questions for you:

Issues?

Does GitHub have an API for their notification / message / what-have-you
system(s)?

What do you use the to-do managers to do? How do they help? Are there any
other ways the notifications are "broken"?

I ask because I may be interested in making a Safari plugin (which I gather is
pretty trivially similar to making a Chrome plugin) to handle a few of the
basics. And I'm a UI/UX nut, so how others handle workflow things like this
fascinate me.

~~~
steveklabnik
Issues is GitHub's built in ticket system. Se here, for example:
<http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/issues>

They can be turned on per-project.

------
jpcx01
Github notifications really needs an overhaul. It kicks ass for V1, but it
would go way farther if there was project level notification settings. Some
projects I only care about commits on X branch, some I don't care about issues
on, and some I never want to see notifications on at all (but have it
bookmarked in the follow feed for later).

Github has been doing mad awesome improvements lately though, so I can't wait
to see what they are able to come up with.

------
samratjp
Actually I wish I could get growl notifications for the really important ones.

~~~
jackowayed
It would be cool if they extended the service hooks[1] to handle that. So then
you could get the notification by Email, Notifo, Campfire, etc. (And I have
some code that goes Notifo->Growl that I need to clean up and document.) Right
now the service hooks are just for pushes.

If I could say I want IRC to get notified about pull requests, new issues, and
comments on issues, want to get emailed about new issues (note that that's a
repeat) and comments on my commits, and want to get notified about pull
requests (also a repeat), that would be awesome.

I'm not sure how many people would want a crazy setup like that, but I could
see wanting Campfire/IRC to get notified about more than just pushes.

[1] <http://github.com/github/github-services>

