Unable to clear notification counter

Platform: Website

Browser: chrome

URLs:

Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Screenshot_20200607-143451_Chrome

Description of problem:
I am not able to clear the notification counter. Everytime I click on the icon the counter will only reduce by a few hundreds and will not be set to zero.

3 Likes

Woah…hope someone can help!

Having this many notifications is pretty unusual. It might be intentional that it doesn’t clear all your notifications, since not all 3000+ notification will appear in the dropdown when you click it. Does it get cleared down to zero when you click / refresh many times?

On the off chance you haven’t found this setting, check it out in your account settings. As a very active user, I’ve found it necessary to uncheck it:
image
https://www.inaturalist.org/users/edit

Also just a note that the iNat staff are in the middle of redesigning the dashboard and notification system.

3 Likes

The only reliable way to clear mine under the speech bubble on the website is to click “view your dashboard” at the bottom under the flyout menu for the bubble.

When click on the bubble it will display zero but a few seconds later it will show the number rediced by a few hundreds.

It is not intentional. It was due to a few ‘identifiers’ who regularly confirming all the research grade ids I have done.

I have disabled the notification setting for confirming identifications.

This doesn’t work. I guess I will have to manually click on the icon a few hundred times

I mean that the notification dropdown may have been intentionally designed to work this way.

not sure how useful this is if you’re not a coder, but looking at the API, i think you should be able to clear the notifications via the observation updates endpoints. i didn’t realize they were there until today. so i didn’t think it was possible to get those notifications via the API until now… i had wanted to write something to display notifications though. so maybe when i get around to that i’ll include a way to mark stuff as reviewed, too…

UPDATE: i did a quick test, and i decided against trying to create something that could clear the notifications. (it looks like the endpoint that clears the notifications must be requested one observation id at a time. so it don’t want to write anything that could potentially send out thousands of requests like that.)

if anyone’s curious about how the flow would generally work, i’m attaching a couple of screenshots that i hope will explain things. if anyone would like more detail, let me know.

1 Like

I think as others have noted, this is how the notifications system works, at the moment. It wasn’t really designed for situations where one has thousands of unread notifications.

The eventually updated notifications system should include a “mark all as reviewed” option.

1 Like