Inbox improvements are live

Question

The feedback up until January 3^rd, 2023 has been catalogued and handed over to the product team. Any further feedback or bug reports should be posted as a new question.

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TL;DR: The inbox improvements we previously announced are now live (as of November 29th, 2022 13:30 UTC).

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Thank you to our beta testers!

A huge thank you to moderators who helped us beta-test these inbox changes! Your feedback was invaluable, and we could not be here without you.

New features

This post will provide a short overview of the new features, focusing especially on a few special cases not covered in the previous post. The changes will be rolled out to all sites, unless mentioned otherwise in the feature list below.

We will post an update here when the changes will be released.

• Marking notifications as read/unread:

  • On all Stack Exchange top bars, except for the ones on Area 51 and the chat sites, the inbox dropdown will support individually marking messages as read/unread (or marking them all read at once), without needing to open the notification in a new tab/window.
  • Opening up the inbox will no longer automatically mark all messages as being read.
  • Note: opening the inbox in chat will automatically mark all messages as being read until the changes will be applied there.

• Filtering to only show unread messages: All Stack Exchange pages, except for the inbox that is on the chat rooms listing, Area 51 pages, and stackexchange.com, will support filtering to only show unread messages in the inbox.

• New design: On all Stack Exchange pages, except for the inbox that is on the chat rooms listing and Area 51 pages, the inbox will have a new design, updated to accommodate new buttons and improve readability.

• Real-time inbox refreshing:

  • All Stack Exchange pages, except for the inbox that is on the chat rooms listing, Area 51 pages, and stackexchange.com, will support real time refreshing of the inbox content.
  • If a new notification arrived while the inbox was opened, the user will have an option to refresh its content manually with a refresh button.
  • We avoid an immediate refresh not to disturb the users while they work on their notifications. This option is also available while working with multiple tabs open at the same time.

• Unread messages in the global inbox: The global inbox page will now highlight the unread items. It is also possible to mark the notifications as read by opening them in the global inbox.

FAQ

Are you planning to bring these inbox improvements to chat as well?

Yes, we plan to update the inbox on all Stack Exchange pages (including chat) to the new style. While 100% compatibility on all sites will be hard to achieve, disabling the new functionality on chat pages is just a temporary solution.

Can I keep the current inbox functionality?

No. However, depending on the feedback, we may introduce the option to keep the current behavior of marking all notifications as read when the inbox is opened. If you want us to implement this as an option, please let us know!

Is this the final version of the inbox?

No, this is our first inbox-related release. We have a backlog of inbox-related issues that we gathered during both internal and beta testing. We plan to incrementally improve the MVP after the public release of the feature, based on the community feedback and product needs.

How should we share feedback on these changes?

If you have any questions, suggestions, or other feedback regarding the inbox improvements we've described here, please post it in an answer below. We'll be gathering feedback until the end of December 2022, after which we ask you to share any bug reports/feature requests by posting a separate question.

Answer 1

However, depending on the feedback, we may introduce the option to keep the current behavior of marking all notifications as read when the inbox is opened. If you want us to implement this as an option, please let us know!

I already kinda did, but I don't mind letting you know again. So yes, please give me the option to mark all as read by just opening the inbox. If I really want to keep something and be annoyed by the indicator, I can then manually mark something as unread.

Answer 2

feature-request status-completed

Mark all notifications from a post as read after opening only one.

Sometimes I get a notification because a followed question is edited, has a comment and a new answer and maybe even closed which are 3-4 different inbox messages, but I only really need to open one.

Can we have a setting to mark all notifications from a single post as read when one is opened?

Answer 3

support / feature-request status-review

Is there keyboard binding for marking messages as read? If not, can one be implemented in the future?

Some times I am already looking at the post where I got a reply. Since I already know what the notification is telling me about, I can just press i -> Esc to open and close the inbox drawer and clear the notification.

I would like to keep being able to use the keyboard when possible and not reach for my mouse. And especially for clearing several notifications, I would prefer to avoid clicking a lot in quick succession. Working with a keyboard is more comfortable than clicking a lot.

Answer 4

bug

If you scroll the Inbox scrollbar all the way to the bottom, all of the items disappear; I'd expect the last few items to remain on the screen. Scrolling back up re-displays the items.

• Browser: Google Chrome, Version 107.0.5304.122 (Official Build) (64-bit); can also reproduce with Microsoft Edge, Version 107.0.1418.62 (Official build) (64-bit)

• OS: Windows 10 Enterprise

• Screen resolution: 1920 x 1080

Answer 5

feature-request

Remember my preference for all/unread (top-left)

When I switch from 'All' to 'Unread' in the top-left, that state is maintained for the lifetime of the page, but not after a refresh.

I pretty much don't care about notifications that I've already read. I prefer the unread view as the default.

If this setting was persistent, then unread could stay as my default state after I changed it once.

Answer 6

feature-request status-completed

A minor request: the wording "mark all read / unread" looks a bit off. Can it be updated to read "mark all as read / unread"? The latter is much more common than the current choice — see the Gmail, Outlook, or GitHub Notifications' wording for a couple of major examples. Keeping the wording consistent across products and services for common actions ensures a smooth user experience.

Answer 7

support

In the spirit of the promise made in Providing a JavaScript API for userscripts back in December 2021, will an effort be made to provide userscript authors with a way to hook into the inbox? If not, please, at least ensure that the logical units of the feature have ids (or js-* classes depending on the team's preferred style) set on them so we do not have to rely on brittle CSS selectors that are subject to break at any point.

Answer 8

feature-request status-completed

Explicitly indicate the number of comments in the notification, so that the numbers add up

Currently, when multiple comments are made on a single post, the notification number will be incremented once for each comment, but the actual dropdown will consolidate those into a single notification from the time it was last opened/marked read. For instance, if one post of mine got three comments and another one of mine got two, the inbox number will be incremented by 5 but only two entries will show in the list (for each of the two posts).

It would be nice if each notification entry that's actually multiple consolidated into one would show the number of notifications that have been consolidated. I often get confused when opening the list which said there are five unread notifications but only seeing one, two, or three ones actually listed, and it makes for poor UX. Showing the number would more clearly indicate how they add up.

Answer 9

After playing around with it for a couple of hours I have to say I really like it!

It's a welcome improvement to something that was always an annoyance, so thank you to the team for implementing.

One enhancement I'd personally like is for where you have several new notifications all linking to the same question - for example, notifications about several new comments and/or one or more new answers on the same question, I'd prefer to have all notifications that relate to this same question marked as read when I click on any of them.

One rather big annoyance is that if I select to show only new messages, this is not remembered - if I refresh the browser window it's back to showing all. Can this setting not be saved, it's a bit redundant otherwise?

And a very minor niggle (no biggie) is when choosing to view only unread messages, I wonder if the window could be sized appropriately – i.e., if no new messages, then don't show a large blank area but increase its size until it reaches the max (could it be user-draggable like an answer text box?).

Answer 10

feature-request

Mark notification as read if opened in new tab by any means (including right click menu -> open in new tab).

If one left clicks on an unread item, the relevant post/comment/whatever is opened and the item is marked as read (at least sometimes, not sure what the exact conditions are...).

Can we please get the same behaviour if we open the item in a new tab (e.g. by right clicking and selecting "open link in new tab")? At the moment, this just opens the relevant post in a new tab, but the item stays unread and one needs to open the inbox yet another time to mark the item as read...

Answer 11

bug? feature-request? status-completed

Clicking "mark as read" on a collapsed multiple notifications item should mark all of them as read or mark the shown one as read and show a previously hidden unread item.

Currently, this is what happens:

1. Get multiple notifications from a single post (say, 3).
2. The inbox icon has 3 in red circle, and when I open it, there is a single collapsed unread item.
3. Click "mark as read" on it. Now all items shown are marked as read, but the inbox icon still indicates 2 unread items.
4. When I close and open the inbox, then it shows another unread item from the same post.

I think the behavior at step 3 should be changed to one of the following:

• all associated items are marked as read (and the inbox counter decremented by that amount);
• only the shown item is marked as read, and the next unread item from the same post shows up immediately.

Answer 12

bug

My impression is that with the old design, when I was notified about an unread chat message, reading it would turn off the inbox notification for it.

Not so with the new design. It notifies me of an "unread" chat message even after I have read it and even replied to it.

In some more detail, this is different from the "bring back the old behavior" requests in that I think this use case is separate, and easier to reason about:

If there is a notification balloon in chat, I have an unread message, and the inbox should notify me about that.

If there is not a notification balloon in chat, that message is now by definition not unread.

For some more context, I have several browser tabs open with the chat rooms I'm participating in. So I basically never click an inbox notification to be taken to an unread chat message because that would duplicate a tab I already have open.

Answer 13

bugdesign

"Read" notifications are literally grayed-out, making the entire box gray.
This feels completely out of place, it's the darkest element on the page (on Meta and light mode SO):

I'd prefer it to have some opacity, for example:

(Crossposted from my SO Meta question after I found this announcement)

Answer 14

Update the cached count of notifications once the dropdown is opened

Sometimes, a stale number of unread notifications will show in the dropdown, which happens when one or more notifications received since the number was loaded have been marked read from a different instance of the site (another window or tab on the same device, or a different device) but the number in the first instance hasn't had a chance to update. Perhaps it didn't receive the WebSocket ping that updates the number (because, e.g., the device was put to sleep, briefly lost its Internet connection, or the browser put the tab to sleep to save resources), or perhaps the user's browser loads in a cached version of the page with a stale count.

In that case, when I open the dropdown (successfully), the actual current state of my notifications being read/unread are loaded in, but the number on the button still reads the old stale number. This creates a UX inconsistency where the number displayed doesn't match the actual number.

Currently, the only workaround I've tested is to click the button to mark all notifications as read. In the case I've encountered, where it showed a number of 1 but the actual dropdown showed nothing unread, clicking that updated the number and made it disappear. However, this causes undesired effects if one has deliberately left unread notifications. Another workaround is to fully reload the page, but this is a bad solution for someone on a slow connection or one that imposes a heavy data cap.

When the dropdown is opened and the current live status of unread and read notifications is loaded, can the number shown in the button please be updated to show the actual count in case it was stale since the last load?

Answer 15

feature-request

Expand the filtering functionality

I think an option to filter for certain SE network(s) would be helpful. I keep an eye on my Stack Overflow notifications, but I miss them on the other networks from time to time. Having that option would make it easier for me to circle back to them.

If you decided this is a valid request, then you may want to implement a filter for different types of notifications, i.e. comments, chat, etc. while you're at it.

Answer 16

At least on StackOverflow, I noticed that I have to manually mark the notification as read which is kind of annoying. Previously once I open the messages menu, the unread count notification automatically went away.

Is there a setting using which we can revert to previous behavior?

Answer 17

I find the new design quite confusing, because the bottom button Go to full inbox is white. As such it gives me the impression, that the blue-grayish items are actually unread, because they have a different colour, and the white (unread) items are read. The bold-face font does not really help either and the icons are too far on the right, so it takes a second glance to confirm.

I think it could already help, to colour the bottom button in the same background colour as the rest of the design.

Edit: I also just noticed that this contrasts directly with the Achievements tab, which uses white as a background colour for read items, and the blue-ish/grayish tint for new items.

Please fix this :)

Answer 18

feature-request

Add a way to sort unread items to the top

Currently, both read and unread notifications are sorted in the order they were received — it is, of course, expected behavior (and one can always filter out read items), but it would be great to be able to split the notifications inbox modal in two groups: read and unread items.

Grouping unread items allows one to quickly determine what else needs attention without the need to scroll back-n-forth through the list (which can be pretty long for active users) searching for items that might still require attention.

As a precedent, there is an "inbox type" setting in the Gmail web interface:

We could have something similar: either as a dropdown with sort options or as a profile preference (how it is implemented is not particularly important).

Answer 19

As an occasional user and mod on a small site, most of my notifications are comments on answers and such where I basically interact by opening the inbox, reading the comment, deciding if I want to do something, and then leaving the site.

I get that you want to get more engagement to the site, and this functionality seems pretty useful for the highly engaged users who have lots of notifications and want to interact with them. But for me, this just adds another click - one I don't want to make.

Please bring back the old functionality as an option for people like me - and frankly it should be the default option. This method is too difficult to discover for new users - the "mark a notification as read" button (the little envelope) is not intuitive - and new users are the ones who will find this the least useful.

From my point of view, the alternative is for me to add custom CSS to remove the red bubble entirely, which will have the opposite impact of what you're hoping, interaction-wise.

Answer 20

feature-request

If all of my messages are marked as "Read" and I click on the option "Inbox (Unread)" I see the following:

Can we have a message something like "No unread messages" or "All messages have been read by you" or something like that instead of this white space? Also, just like the other answer stated, please change the "Go to full inbox" background colour as it makes the appearance worse.

Answer 21

bug

Very inconsistent count for the Refresh button when toggling the state of a message.

When changing from read to unread or vice versa it some times changes the count for the "Refresh (<number of unread messages>)" button, other times it does not.

I cannot find any consistency in it. See this short video, See how marking a message unread will only some times show "Refresh (1)". And marking a message unread will only some times change to "Refresh (0)".

Does not seem to be related to just clicking many times. Happens even if you click one time. Some times you get no update:

Other times it does work on the first click:

Answer 22

No-one's going to upvote this right at the bottom of the list, but I have to say after a week of giving this a chance…

I absolutely hate the new behaviour.

It has seemingly forgotten the entire advantage of tabbed browsing.

Clicking the envelope doesn't open the message, clicking the message header doesn't mark it as read. This does not work. I have to read it, then mark it as read. Not even the most basic mail app falls this short.

It's just adding more clicks for no benefit, imnsho.
Yet another new paradigm to learn. Two separate interactions for each message.
I just want the count to go away as soon as I start to interact with it & each to mark itself read if I click it to open in a new tab. I send every new message out to a new tab, then go through them. I don't need to then have to go back to the menu to tell it I'm reading the things I already asked it to read.

Answer 23

feature-request status-completed

Accessibility of the filter components

Right now, the clickable area of the filter functionality is very small.

This is the clickable area for the dropdown; it’s only the arrow on its own, when I would have expected the full “Inbox (all)” text to be clickable since that’s what I am switching :

]

Similarly, within the drop down the clickable area is also smaller than I would have expected. It’s only the text that is clickable:

]

I would have expected here that the area where the checkmark icon is being displayed is also clickable. This would help being able to select the other options since in my first attempt, I clicked a few pixels too far to the left of “Unread” and nothing happened.

Answer 24

bug

Safari 15.5, Mac OS 12.4

Clicking on the message to open the notification's linked post does not mark the message as read, only clicking the envelope (or clicking "mark all read") does.

Answer 25

bug

Description:

Someone replied to one of my answers. I see a red 1 on my inbox icon. I click on the inbox icon and I see the new message listed along with others I've already read. I click on the link to the new message and get taken to the new comment below my answer. That all seems correct.

However, despite having now seen and read the new message by clicking on its link in the inbox dropdown, the red 1 is still being shown and the message is still shown as unread.

If I click on the "new" message link a second time then finally the red 1 goes away and the message is listed as read.

I would expect the message to appear as read after clicking its link in my inbox the first time. It should not take two views of the same message to mark it as read.

I can of course click on the little envelope icon to the right of the message instead of clicking on the message a second time to mark it as read but that shouldn't be necessary either.

This issue has happened for each new message I've received today since this change went live.

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Updated Info on this issue:

This morning I refreshed my browser on stackoverflow.com. The inbox icon had a red 3 on it. I clicked on the mailbox icon and while there was a red 3, the inbox only showed one new message (from this post). I clicked the envelope icon and the red 3 changed to a 2. I clicked the link for the new message and was taken here. I clicked the inbox icon and now I see the message I clicked (marked as read) and a second message from this post (marked as unread). This time I just clicked the unread message link and I was taken back to the comments below this post. The red 2 changed to a 1. So one more time I clicked on the inbox icon and now I see the two read messages I've just clicked on and now a third unread message for this post. Finally I click on the 3rd message link and there's no more red number but now I see only one recent message from this post (marked as read).

This is so confusing. Let me try to summarize what I've seen so far:

1. It seems while viewing meta.stackexchange.com that clicking the link for an unread message does correctly mark the message as read and reduce the red number on the inbox icon.
2. For me, while on the main stackoverflow.com site, clicking the link for an unread message does not mark the message as read nor does it reduce the red number on the inbox icon. A second click on the same link does mark it as read and it does reduce the red number on the inbox icon. Clicking the envelope icon next to an unread message does correctly mark the message as read.
3. Getting multiple messages about the same post results in undesired behavior. The red number shows the total number of new messages but the inbox only shows one new message initially. Clicking the new message link results in one additional message for the post appearing in the inbox. This repeats until all new messages for that post have been clicked. At which point the inbox shows only one (read) message for the post.

Answer 26

So I'm on a question that I've left a comment on and someone responds to my comment with an @. I read the comment, respond, and move on to another tab. That new tab now has a notification informing me of the comment I just responded to. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the old inbox did this too, however with the old inbox this was at least clearable with double clicking the icon. Now, I have to click the icon, wait for the inbox to open and load, then find the "mark all as read" button and click it. I understand it's just a simple extra step, but it's not so simple when the dialog isn't instant, it's just getting in the way.

If it would stop notifying me of things I've already dealt with it wouldn't be getting in my way nearly every time I get a notification.

Answer 27

support bug

When clicking entries in the "unread" filter, sometimes the entry disappears and the link doesn't get opened.

This has happened to me for primary-click (open in same tab) and middle-click (open in new tab).

In certain scenarios, this doesn't happen. I haven't figured out the exact details on when it happens. I'll keep experimenting and listing my findings.

Answer 28

bug status-planned

Opening a message using keyboard shortcut does not mark it as read.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Have one unread message. You can just toggle the top one to be unread.
2. Press I for Inbox -> 1 to go to the first message (or 2, 3, etc for other messages).

Expected: Opening a message marks it as read. Actual: It does not. However, left-clicking with the mouse does mark the message as read when opening it.

Answer 29

feature-request

Change All/Unread (top-left) to a better control than a dropdown menu

Why is this control a dropdown menu when there's only 2 options? It takes 2 clicks to change something that should only take 1.

The clickable area is also very small which is bad for accessibility.

It would be better as some kind of toggle control.

Answer 30

bug design

«Go to full inbox» partially visible on mobile Chrome (iPadOS):