FYI: The "quirks" of notifications for Ideas pages

A number of you have noted that you do not seem to be "consistently" getting notifications for (XPP) Ideas, and we at RWS/SDL have noticed the same thing.

We did some investigating, and found some answers that we wanted to share with you, as there is an "action" you can take if you want to in order to consistently get notifications.

What it boils down to is that the setup/settings for notifications for Ideas pages are different than those for Forum pages.

There are the main "Email digest options" subscription options and the "Turn ideation notifications on/off" option, that most of you are already aware of (or you wouldn't be getting any notifications at all) and that are described in the "help" pages for Ideas - so I'm not going to discuss those. But there are other notification settings.

If you go to SDL Community (logged in) and go to your Account > Settings > Notifications you will see the following list of options under "Subscriptions" and "Content You Write" (notice highlighted options below):

The option highlighted in green makes you get a notification for all new Ideas that are posted.

But notice that the two options highlighted in yellow in the Subscriptions section talk about "Ideas I'm subscribed to" referring to specific Ideas posts, not "Ideations I'm subscribed to" which would mean something like all XPP Ideas posts.

Notice that in the Content You Write section of options there is the yellow highlighted option to get notifications when "Comments are made on content that I have commented on". What that means (we think), is that once you comment on an Idea then after that you will receive notifications for any comments to that Idea (but not on comments made before your first comment). From what we can tell, this is actually accomplished by automatically subscribing you to that specific Idea (once you comment on it) - which I'll describe next.

If you want to make sure that you receive notifications for a specific Idea, whether or not you have commented on it, you can subscribe to that Idea. To do this you have to open up (or click on) the specific Idea, and then scroll to the bottom of the original post and next to the date you click on "More" and you will see an option to turn on (or off) notifications for the specific Idea (aka subscribing to the specific Idea):

So this is the way it (currently) works for Ideas with the notification options that are available.

What I've done personally is to go through the (currently three) pages of "any open status" XPP Ideas and gone to each Idea and subscribed to it - which was somewhat "painful" to have to do.

Now, when I receive notification of a new Idea I immediately go to view the Idea and click on More and subscribe to it. Then I know I'll receive notifications for any comments that are made on any Idea.

Internally we (XPP) have requested that new Notifications options(s) be added to turn on notifications for "Ideations" (status changes and comments), instead of just specific "Ideas", but of course we don't know if or when such might be added.

Hope this helps.