I told myself to test the new Leofinance notifications more thoroughly now that the system has been upgraded.
Both the Discord notification services that I use don't currently work, so it's the best time to start using the notifications from Leofinance and see if I can get used to them.
As a first remark, the Leofinance notifications work for Leofinance content and almost nothing else. If you publish a post that doesn't have the 'leofinance' tag, it won't be picked up by the notification system on Leofinance (and it shouldn't).
Let's start with the great stuff.
The first impression is that the notifications look much better when they are not color-coded by their type.
I believe the search option for the account(s) that interacted with your account is useful. It requires you to know there was an interaction, whether it was a comment, reply, mention, follower, or even vote. Otherwise said, to know who to search for.
Normally, people would want to check out comments, replies and - unless mentioned all the time for no good reason - mentions. And having a way to quickly find a conversation is great.
Regarding votes notifications, I don't have any observations. The notifications work great. The amount is showed in dollars, which is easier for most people, and represent the total of LEO and HP+HBD rewards. On the post or comment that was voted, it is showed the breakdown of rewards between LEO and HP+HBD (showed as HBD). This breakdown is displayed on hovering over the post rewards amount in dollars.
My most important observations are for comments/replies received:
- the notification shows the comment/reply received, but it doesn't show to which post it was made and there is no way to easily go to it, as far as I could tell (the permlink of the comment is displayed but can't be clicked and can't be copied directly); if you receive enough comments, it is a matter of attempting to guess from the comment on which post it was made (it isn't always possible)
- if a conversation takes place and it can extend on days, we may need to be reminded of the context; I like how the discussions matter is handled in general on Hive, with two links: "View original post" and "View parent post"
I like the live notifications, but on click I'd like to be sent to the respective interaction. Currently, it appears these notifications are just hidden on click.
For followers, I'm not sure notifications work. Live notifications work, but they aren't showed in the notifications page. Just tried with one of my accounts to follow my account:
That Unread notification should have been the follow, But it doesn't display anything.
And finally, mentions generally work as they should. But they seem to be bugged here and there.
Here's an example, where application error is received when I try to check out my last mention from @youarealive (not that I normally check comments or mentions from bots, but for testing we do things that we don't often do):
That seems to happen on all of their mentions.
Something else I am not sure is intended or not, but mentions from some other bots (but not all of them) go to their profile page instead of the comment itself. I don't have a problem with that since I ignore these comments anyway. Just remarking, in case a consistent approach is what is desired.
Luckily, I haven't found any broken mention that matter.
Speaking of bugs, as I tested things out earlier, and without a clear pattern, it seems in some cases comments are loaded and in some cases they aren't. This is a bug that needs to be fixed because it is a reason why people would rather use a different interface to interact with long-form content.
Overall, a much improved notifications system, which is helping me a lot these days. By the way, I also really like the "Mark as Read" button.