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I understand a few similar questions have been asked, but this is hopefully completely separate functionality.

Say you have Facebook open in Tab 1 of your favorite browser (mine is Chrome). When someone posts on your wall, comments, adds you as a friend (the list goes on), you get a number in the title of the page(tab) saying Facebook(1), indicating some sort of activity. The same thing happens if you're ON the page itself, I presume there is a notification ticker of some sort.

I already love the new Stack Exchange logo logo which does show notifications but only when you refresh look at the page.

I often find myself at work answering a question here and there and then I forget about it and do some actual work. 4 hours later, I click on my profile and BOOM, you have 8 comments, probably because you forgot to .Dispose() of an object or something :)

If my Stack Overflow tab title showed something like

(4) What's your favorite C# book?

Or, for pinned tabs, a browser will also indicate the title changed:

It would attract my attention to go and see who's complaining about my answer, if the OP needs more information or whether someone is just happy with my post.

So rather than refreshing Stack Overflow on an hourly basis, could we automate this and make our lives easier?

What do you think?

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2 Answers 2

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I think you shouldn't forget to .Dispose()! That's an offense! Off with his head!

I think it could be implemented for the stackexchange badge. After all, we've already got this notifications when somebody posts an answer to a question we're currently answering. So the notification system is there and changing the window title shouldn't be too expensive.

All in all, good idea!

Just to be extensive, it's a very sought after feature in all the communities i've been around; almost all the time, when the site doesn't deliver, a greasemonkey or similar extension is created to do the job.

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    I don't think a Greasemonkey script is worth it. Implementing it here would be more efficient.
    – nanofarad
    May 2, 2013 at 20:02
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I think this may be distracting, actually. I'd rather focus on the question at hand, rather than receiving a notification every few minutes from chat and the such.

No objections if this was enabled on the index page only, however.

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    Ew, no notifications from chat please! This notification is more for when you're idling rather than answering a question. If you are writing something (question or an answer), you will see your notifications as soon as you click Post. A lot of the time I'm doing my usual work but find myself clicking refresh every hour or so to see if I have any updates. Yaknowaasayin? :)
    – Marko Ivanovski
    Oct 5, 2010 at 23:55
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    @marko there are already notifications from chat of @replies inserted into the global inbox
    – Jeff Atwood
    Oct 6, 2010 at 0:09
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    Thanks @Jeff, I'm not familiar with chat but by the sounds of things it could get annoying being prompted for every reply received.
    – Marko Ivanovski
    Oct 6, 2010 at 0:28
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    @grace are you actually referring to the way it works, or the way you imagine it works?
    – Jeff Atwood
    Oct 6, 2010 at 16:26
  • Gotta hate when people delete their comments @Jeff :)
    – Marko Ivanovski
    Oct 7, 2010 at 19:54
  • I usually have my user profile open and having that specific page update its title when a question or comment is left would save me loads of time from opening the window 'just to make sure' I haven't missed anything or left someone hanging for too long. 90% of the time there has been no activity so a quick glance that doesn't involve windowing activity actually seems like a great idea to me.
    – veeTrain
    May 15, 2012 at 17:51
  • @veeTrain chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/…
    – badp
    May 15, 2012 at 18:12
  • @badp, thank you for the excellent option. While nice in theory, I agree with the OP that an unread messages count would be really handy to put in the title of the user page. This would not be any more of a nuisance than the red (1) animation that shows up, it would mean that I wouldn't have to even have a browser up / open (i.e., I could be coding and just notice the change in the desktop taskbar), and seemed like it would be easy to implement since the animation already is taking place. How could this feature request be more promoted? Also, I'm not comfortable giving my data to that plugin
    – veeTrain
    May 15, 2012 at 19:38

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