How can I make Stack Overflow make a sound when a new question appears?

Question

I'm wondering how can I make SO do a sound like the case when you get a new message on Facebook with new questions. Does there exist an option to enable this kind of stuff?

Answer 1

As far as I know, Servy is right in that there is no feature on SE that will do this for you.

However, you can create an IFTTT recipe of your own to do just that. Since you indicated you were interested in following a specific tag, here are instructions for that.

1. Grab the RSS link from the tag you're interested in, by hovering over it and selecting the RSS link from the dropdown:

2. Plug it into the "IF" part of a new recipe on ifttt.com

3. Then you can choose from many different ways of being notified about it -- you can change the colors of your Philips HUE lightbulbs, for instance; or receive a text message, email, iOS or Android notification about it, among many other things.

....though if email is good enough for your purposes, then you can also hit the "subscribe" link in that dropdown (as highlighted in my picture, above), which will send every new question under that tag as an email to whichever email account you have registered with SE.

Enjoy!

Answer 2

You can leverage the websockets with the following userscript, that works for all stackexchange sites (you might want to adapt the @match) on the questions tagged pages. I've added some alternative sounds you can choose from.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Ping on new question
// @namespace    https://stackoverflow.com/users/578411/rene
// @version      0.2
// @description  ping if a new question arrives
// @author       rene
// @match        *://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*
// @match        *://superuser.com/questions/tagged/*
// @match        *://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/*
// @match        *://*.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    // alternative sound sources
    //cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/so.mp3
    //cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/se.mp3
    //cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/sf.mp3
    //cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/su.mp3
    //cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/meta.mp3
    //cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/bonfire.mp3
    //cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/ubuntu.mp3
    var  ws = new WebSocket("wss://qa.sockets.stackexchange.com"),
         audio = $('<audio id="tag_ping" src="//cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/meta2.mp3" preload="metadata"></audio>');

     ws.onmessage = function(msg){
        // check for hearbeat
        var message = $.parseJSON(msg.data);
        if (message.data === 'hb') {
            ws.send(message.data);
        } else {
            audio[0].play();
        }
    };
    ws.onopen = function(){
        var parts = window.location.pathname.split('/'),
            site = '//' + window.location.host;
        // let's register for the tag we are on...
        // if the url is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript?sort=newest&pageSize=50
        // parts will hold
        // ["", "questions", "tagged", "javascript"]
        if (parts.length > 2) {
            // now find out which siteid we are on
            // which can be found in the site-switcher
            $.get(site + '/topbar/site-switcher/site-list', function (data)  {
                /* the data is html and looks like this:
                <li><a class="other-site-link js-gps-track" href="//stackoverflow.com" data-id="1" data-gps-track= .... </a></li>
                we are finding the anchor with an href matching our current site and then get the data-id
                */
                var siteId = $(data).find('a[href="'+ site +'"]').attr('data-id');
                // finally we can send a request...
                ws.send(siteId + '-questions-newest-tag-' + parts[3]);  
            });
        }
    };
}());

You can simply open a tab in your favorite browser (but use Chrome to be sure) for the tags you are interested in, for example javascript. From that moment on everytime a datapacket is received on the websocket for that tag the src in the audio element is played. On load it finds the correct siteid to register for the correct events.

This play the ping sound of the Tavern chatroom as soon as there is a new javascript question. This only works for html5 browsers because I create an audio element.

To find out which usefull websocket feeds you can get check this post.

This works with Chrome and Tamper Monkey.

Answer 3

There is no feature to make a sound when you have a new notification.

Answer 4

Browser based:- 1. you can use the Chrome browser extension stackexchange notifier qu which provide sound on new questions.

2. use another Chrome browser extension StackNotifier

Standalone software:- You can use feeddemon rss reader with 5 to 30 mins sync. It shows popup with sound on every new question and answer.