Customizable notifications

While push notifications for Recess activity feed are useful for staying up to date on announcements, session logs, and such, I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants to be able to get push notifications for messages as well. However, this creates the problem of people spamming and forcing people to turn notifications off.

Which brings me to my solution to that. Customizable notifications would allow you to toggle notifications for activity feed posts, activity feed replies, DMs, and different course chats individually. This would allow users to personalize their notifications and ensure that spammers don’t get in the way of people enjoying this feature. This also means that people could disable notifications in the all-recess chat, for example, which is super busy, and still have notifications on for smaller groups where messages are more likely to be important or relevant.

Another tie-in feature that would work well is mentions. Similarly to Discord, people should be able to set certain chats’ notification permissions to be mention only, so only when someone specifically tags them (or the entire group, although that feature may need to be restricted to course guides). This would allow people to easily assess if a message is relevant to them or important to them, thus giving people freedom to receive personalized notifications for busy or active chats.

In essence, customizable notifications would allow users to take charge of not only whether they receive notifications, but which ones they receive. This would allow users to quickly respond to relevant messages, but not be notified for unimportant or irrelevant messages. I think this feature would be a great addition to the push notifications feature, and would allow message notifications in an effective and enjoyable way.