Notification Improvements

Update 1/19/2010: Page build notifications have been added to the list of notifications you can turn on/off and have moved to the Notifications section as well. Thanks!

Today we rolled out updates to the messaging & notification systems for GitHub. We’ve added a couple new features and improved the existing messaging system.

Notification Center

If you check the account settings page, you’ll notice a new tab called Notification Center that holds preferences for all the emails you get from GitHub.

Commit Comment Notifications

We’ve enabled two new email notifications by default: comments on your commits (where you are listed as an author or committer) and comments on commits in your repositories. We understand some commits can get noisy, so we added the ability to turn notifications off on a per-commit basis.

Improved email subjects

All of our email notifications were previously “[GitHub] user sent you a message.” They should be considerably more descriptive and thread friendly now.

Notifications vs Messages

We’ve separated out pull requests and issue comments into a new category called notifications. Your inbox should now be filled solely with actual messages. Notifications will show up next to your username (in grey), while the inbox count only refers to actual messages.

Another small update is that we’ve added a mark all as read button to the inbox and notification sections.

We know there’s always room for improvement with our messaging and notifications — but hopefully this is a step in the right direction. Hope you enjoy!

P.S.: I’d like to take a moment to thank the fine folks who made MockSMTP. It made testing these new email notifications so much easier. If you’re looking for testing app-generated emails locally, check it out.

Written by

Kyle Neath

@kneath