Hi All,

I've started working on notifications again. I had not been very happy with my last proposal, from before the Yahoo Groups apocalypse. I think I've come up with a better solution. Please let me know what you think of this:

• Every notification gets a hashtag. This is already the case with #cal-invite and a few others, but, for example, the moderator notifications don't currently have associated hashtags.
• Users have been able to mute hashtags since the beginning, which means no email. Now, also make it so that users can check a box to turn a hashtag into a web/app notification.

So, walking through a few examples:

• Pending subscriber notification. It's currently an email sent to individual moderators, controlled by an option on your subscription. It gets a hashtag, say #pendingsub. Now, moderators can mute that and/or turn it into a web/app notification (and the option on your subscription goes away).
• Calendar invites. They have the hashtag #cal-invite, and the emails are sent to the group. People can mute those, and now they can also turn them into a notification. The invites still get sent to the group and still appear in the archives and people can still reply to them.
• Chat messages. These don't currently have any notifications. So, a new hashtag would (perhaps) be #chatmsgs. It would be an email sent to people who are subscribed to a chat and who are not currently logged into the chat when the message was sent. People could instead/in addition to turn it into a notification.

This has an advantage that people could now get notifications on any group hashtag as well.

I would modify the existing Hashtags group sidebar to add the ability to turn on/off notifications.

Some notes:

• As I add additional group notifications (like some database/file/photo changes that people have been asking for), that means more notifications will appear in the group archives.
• I haven't thought about whether we'd need some sort of aggregation option.
• I haven't thought about how to decide what appears in the new Notifications feed.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks, Mark