Stop auto-marking notifications to "read"

[Dirk Meyer]

Currently, Mahara marks a new inbox notification as "read" if the notification was emailed to the user.

The idea behind this, was to avoid user annoyance when they've already read a notification in their email, and now have to look at it again in Mahara.

However, as more social network services have come on to the Internet, they have settled on the opposite norm. When a social network emails you about a notification, it also tends to still mark that notification "unread" within the social network itself. So, Mahara should behave the same way in order to avoid confusing users.

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

This sounds like what is happening in https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1440892

If you change the notification types for the notifications to 'Inbox' the number should then reflect the number of unread messages.

[Dirk Meyer (dirkca68)]

Yes, it is. Thank you for looking into this.
 I am just discussing this with a colleague and we are wondering if students use their email in order to receive notifications in about things happening Mahara this could get confusing because all messages are marked as read and there is no notification at the top that lets me know that new messages have come in. Not sure what the fix is but we can see how this could cause problems with students while logged into Mahara.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Dirk,

I've always found this a little confusing as well. And, it sorta goes against the grain of how other social networks work. On Twitter and Facebook, if I set them up to email me about my notifications, they still show the notifications as "unread" when I log in to the application.

So Mahara should probably reverse course on this one, and stop marking messages as "Read" when they've been emailed out. That was probably the correct decision when we implemented it 5 or 6 years ago, but norms on the Internet have evolved since then.

And, the new Inbox makes it a lot easier to deal with unread messages anyway.

Cheers,
Aaron

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hm, on a related note I think Jinelle posted a wishlist item for updating the notification count in realtime (instead of waiting until you reload the page). But I can't seem to find that one right now.