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.
Looks good.
The label for "email" seems to take up so much space that it suggests that you're planning other kinds of notifications?
Have you guys purposely designed the screen for further enhancements?
Thanks guys, I've been waiting for this :)
@kneath Please define "my repositories". Ones created by the account, or ones you are apart of?
It would be nice to send pull requests to all collaborators.
Additionally, disabling private messages to an account, or an auto responder, or forwarding messages to a set of people, would help in situations like Rails, where you have a main account that's usually not logged into, then devs with their own accounts and collaborator access who don't have access to the Rails account.
@kneath It would be nice to subscribe to commit comments without actually having to comment on the commit itself (ala Lighthouses "Watch Ticket" button)
benschwarz: No immediate plans. Just used the label "email" since that's what the notification sends.
KieranP: Your repositories are the same ones that appear on your dashboard under "Your Repositories" — just the ones that you created. We have bigger ideas for repositories like Rails (which this is just a prerequisite step).
Hi
I am Sébastien Gruhier (sgruhier on github) the guy of MockSMTP. Thanks a lot for you P.S. Happy you like it. The idea comes from a personal need, I use it everyday and I hope I'll make mac developer life easier :).
If many people like it, I will add a lot of features on this application (like S3, memcached,... mock functionality).
This all looks great. Cheers guys.
Also, I completely agree -- MockSMTP is fantastic tool and concept.
When I click a check box on the notification settings page, the AJAX request is performed. When I reload the page, though, the checkboxes are all unchecked, regardless of what they were before I checked. Is this because the checkboxes aren't populated with server data, or because the AJAX requests fails somehow?
That's "regardless of what they were before I reloaded the page".
This is a real lifesaver -- thank you kneath. I had well over 300 messages piled up from issue notifications, and being able to mark them all as read means I can start using the inbox again. You're really putting the polish on ... keep it up!
What about a setting for notifications on Pages-builds? Maybe a toggle between all off/all on/only errors.
Nice.
How about losing the "[GitHub] " prefix in the subjects, too? That's what the "from" field is for.
I'm glad to see this, but it is unclear to me which kind of mail I have to deselect to not get the "Your page has been built" emails from github pages?
Page builds are going to be moving to notifications shortly, I just need to iron out some bugs that popped up while trying to deploy those changes.
hernrik: I'd be all for it, but I don't want to mess with people's email filters.
Loving this!
I seem to be getting the wrong usernames on my notifications for issues, though... it's telling me the new message is from the person who opened the issue, instead of the person who last commented on it.
noonat: Sorry about that, a small bug that crept in. Should be fixed now.
Very welcome improvements! You left out a huge annoyance though: GitHub "page built" notifications. It would be nice if they could be moved over to the notifications system so that I can disable them from being sent to my email ;-)
Thanks for the updates though, I've been wanting email notifications for commit comments for a while.
This is weird - in the morning, I had all notifications turned on, and I didn't change anything there, and now they're all off - was that intentional?
psionides: should be fixed now, not intentional :)
thx :)
Wonderful, thank you. The comment emails will make for a great code review process for our team. RSS feeds for comments didn't work quite as well.
great
very nice, thx