24

Recently this notification has started showing up quite repeatedly on Stack Exchange sites:

enter image description here

The problem is that it's not necessary, and even if it is, it should not be showing up repeatedly.

In just the last few months, these sorts of notifications have really risen on the Internet (think of YouTube's new notifications in the lower-left hand corner), and they are very stressful to deal with for three reasons:

  1. They add clutter to the site's UI.

  2. They are typically not necessary or relevant for the user.

  3. Users should not have to dismiss the same notification over and over again.

All of these issues apply here. Can we please get rid of this notification, and can we please keep the site's UI clean? A clean, non-spammy UI is one of the reasons Stack Exchange got to be as popular as it is.

EDIT:

As Mark Kirby pointed out in the comments, there was a very similar answer to this question. That answer and my own post are suggesting two fairly similar things, with one difference:

The one answer suggests making the dismissal of this notification sitewide, and I suggest getting rid of it altogether. In fact, I suggest never having notifications for things like this in general. Clean notifications for community activity and such are great, but messy notifications for UI features, news updates, and so on are basically just clutter and an irritant.

So there is some similarity between the two suggestions, but there's a little bit of difference as well.

Improve this question
5

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

Once you dismiss this on any site, it should not show up there again.

It is being shown to everyone right now (once per site) to publicize a new feature that was released earlier this week.

After an introductory period, we will switch it to only showing for new users.

If you dismiss it and it returns on the same site, please let me know.

Improve this answer
9
  • 8
    I have had to dismiss it multiple times on my Super User profile.
    – Ramhound
    Apr 2, 2020 at 17:34
  • Thank you for your answer. I just now got it again on SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange. It seems to go away for the same site within the same browser session, but seems to have issues between browser sessions. I'm not sure if there's anything else needed to reproduce it, but in my case just now, I was logged in to the same account in both scenarios.
    – Panzercrisis
    Apr 2, 2020 at 20:07
  • 3
    Can you please check your console tab and see if any errors, and network tab and see what call made when you click to dismiss? We have double checked, should not be session based, should update flag on your user that will prevent it from showing again.
    – Yaakov Ellis StaffMod
    Apr 2, 2020 at 20:41
  • I'll try to do it next time it shows up.
    – Panzercrisis
    Apr 3, 2020 at 1:56
  • 3
    All right, I’ll bite: why do you want it to keep showing for new users rather than getting rid of it completely? Even for new users, there are no such popovers for the dozens of other features of the UI (or at least I hope so, as it would create an ungodly mess); do you consider the follow feature particularly confusing? If so, wouldn’t it be more effective to explain it in a new user tutorial, or something?
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Apr 3, 2020 at 8:30
  • 3
    That is, even though the follow feature as such is awsome, you should see by now from the many reactions and votes that the popover is universally regarded as an extreme annoyance. Now, I thought the official SE policy was to be more welcoming towards new users, not to deter them with extreme annoyance.
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Apr 3, 2020 at 9:01
  • 1
    @YaakovEllis okay I just reproduced the issue with Firefox 74.0 (64-bit) on Win 10. On the site where I clicked cross sign to dismiss, network tab shows nothing and the only warning in console was "Request to access cookie or storage on “<URL>” was blocked because it came from a tracker and content blocking is enabled". Extensions enabled are only DevTools ADB and Snap Links
    – gnat
    Apr 3, 2020 at 12:05
  • 1
    @gnat most likely your ad blocker. It should make an Ajax call to save that you saw it. (call is to main domain, no idea why would be blocked)
    – Yaakov Ellis StaffMod
    Apr 3, 2020 at 12:25
  • 2
    @YaakovEllis I don't use ad blockers. I heard though that Firefox recently instroduced stricter handling of stuff that looks like tracking / ads, so maybe it somehow tripped browser's "suspicions" (FWIW I am not going to fiddle with browser defaults in case if these are indeed a reason)
    – gnat
    Apr 3, 2020 at 12:57

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .