solarbird: (Default)
solarbird ([personal profile] solarbird) wrote in [site community profile] dw_suggestions2017-04-08 07:40 pm

"Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip

Title:
"Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip

Area:
navigation strip, messaging

Summary:
It is currently very easy to configure your Inbox to serve as an activity notification hub. It would be very useful to have a shorted version of the first page of that Inbox be accessible via a dropdown on the Navigation Strip, and allow some manipulation of your Inbox via that dropdown.

Description:
Each line of the proposed dropdown would contain a one line description of the activity. (N replied to [your post|comment], N messaged you, subject "", N posted to group X, and so on). Each entry would contain an "x" dismissal button which would delete the notification from both the Inbox and the dropdown. Clicking on an individual entry outside of the dismissal button would take you to the item about which you are being notified - the message, the comment made, etc - and mark it as read. A "see all" entry at the bottom of the dropdown could take you to the current Inbox view. Currently, using the Inbox as a notification centre results in large numbers of page swaps and reloads, as you go from Inbox to post to Inbox to reply form to Inbox etc., etc., etc., with mark-as-read and delete-item as separate actions across separate pages. Further, it is difficult to maintain (de-clutter, etc) without engaging in that maintenance as a separate task. As a result, those of us who have this issue end up with over-full Inboxes that we tend to bulk-delete. This suggested feature would allow us both to use our Inbox more easily and maintain it more effectively, resulting in improved usability of the service and - hopefully - fewer notifications being stored on the servers.

Poll #18205 "Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 37


This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
9 (24.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (13.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
6 (16.2%)

(I have no opinion)
17 (45.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-16 04:03 am (UTC)(link)
The thing is, it would force me to use the navbar, which I'm currently not using on my own journal (just on other people's - but I'm not even sure why I have it set like that, because I don't like using it).

If not for that I'd vote yes; a possible "with changes" might be making a new navbar for this alone (or setting the existing navbar to display this alone, instead of displaying all the traditional navbar stuff), which I'll think about as I eat the chili I just got done making). :)

ETA: my "with changes" is that the functionality is coded into the navbar in such a way that it's like an added strip laying across the top of the navbar (but still nested within navbar HTML so it can be styled and even displayed separately, if one so desires).
Edited (eta, typos) 2017-04-16 04:13 (UTC)
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-17 05:56 am (UTC)(link)
I am pretty sure the navstrip is targetable via CSS, yes! (But if you have specific improvements you think would make it better, mock it up and show us and we'll see if we should change it in general. *g*)
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 03:02 am (UTC)(link)
(I mean, if nothing else, can we at least get the text baselines to match up?

So, if I'm reading you right, I use custom CSS for the navbar that *might* do what you want - not a lot - just enough to make it more in tune with the design on my DW (which is custom, but not originally made by me, just poked at enough by me via CSS that it no longer looks exactly like the original).

I'll set it to display on my journal in a few minutes and keep it that way (showing when you click through) until you get to see it - tell me what you think! The CSS I'm using (if it helps you do anything design-wise with the navabr) is the following (as is anything below or in my style sheet that starts with #lj_controlstrip):



Copying/pasting into another DW layout might not work perfectly because I don't always keep all my CSS chunks for different parts of the page in one spot (that's most of it, above; I just can't guarantee that's all of it without going through the rest of my style sheet), so if you run into any funkiness in trying to use it, let me know.
Edited (typos/clarity) 2017-04-18 03:04 (UTC)
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 06:12 am (UTC)(link)
Thanks! I just re-did the code - after not updating it for a while, then comparing it to your .png files tonight, I decided it Needed Things, so now it has them (I took out some code, too - mostly stuff that wasn't useful).

For comparison (if you like), the new code is now:

marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 06:23 am (UTC)(link)
I wonder if that's only in Firefox (that's what I'm using, too)? I thought DW hid it (when I remove my CSS, DW seems to also hide it). I'll check it out in other browsers, just to see.
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 06:44 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah (Firefox on Win10 here), you're right.

The funny thing is, I had the search text field in there until the last moment (I had to add it, because I noticed it was missing, myself), then took it out when I thought DW wasn't using it, either (apparently they are; it's something else in my CSS obscuring it. I have that problem with my code, a lot: I need search teams to dig through it sometimes just to find what went wrong/missing/is making something look funky).

I like how you nudged search all the way to the right. Which is making me think I want to go for dividing the page into thirds and spreading the three sections more evenly (I think I only had them smashed together to make it easier to style for mobile).

And I see we both have those tiny, tiny text fields for log-in username/password when I suppress cookies to give me the logged-out view. I guess that's native to the DW design, but I'd like to work on making those boxes bigger when I get another good chunk of time.

ETA: Put the search field back in and widened the username and password boxes while I was at it. I didn't think those would wrap* on mobile, but they do! *so happy*

*Of course, now I'll have to test tonight's changes in nine browsers across three phones, two laptops and our tablets, but wheeee, it's a start! )

Edited (clarity, eta) 2017-04-18 08:16 (UTC)
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: also, i must note that it's part of a bigger problem

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-17 09:09 am (UTC)(link)
Oh man, I'm trying so fucking hard not to make fierce grabby hands at you right now, you have no idea. We don't have a lot of graphic design experience in our core team, and it definitely shows! (We're a little better at UI/UX design, but even with that, a lot of times we're winging it.) I'd love it if you put together mockups of a few potential options you think would work better -- from "minor tweaks to make it look better/present information better but not change things massively" all the way to "completely redesign everything from the ground up", even, if you wanted. We're not proud; we're happy to consider improvements on just about anything. :)

(If you have style fixes for text overlap and block problems and the like, meanwhile -- for any of our styles, I mean, not just for the one you're using -- I will make grabby hands over those, too! Overflow display bugs are always annoying, because no matter how good your test-case journal is during development, there will always be stuff cropping up once a style hits the Real World with Real World Data. Ditto if you have suggestions or redesigns for other pages. LOOK, WE JUST MAKE GRABBY HANDS AT ANYONE WHO SO MUCH AS SAYS THE WORD 'DESIGN' NEAR US OKAY)

There are a few caveats:

* The thing that does the navstrip on journals and the thing that does the menus/top quicklinks on site-skinned pages are generated in totally different places, so they can't be merged. (And not every site skin has the action links in the same places -- for instance, Celerity puts it on the left side, as do Gradation Horizontal and Gradation Vertical. Tropo Red/Purple are actually the only ones that put the quick action links on the right, in fact.) We are totally up for considering a new site skin or changes to the existing ones! But that all runs through a different system.

* We use Foundation as a framework on site pages -- like, the site skins themselves are not done in Foundation, and neither are journals, but the individual page layouts are. We try to standardize as much as possible and use everything entirely out-of-the-box with minimal customization, because the more you fuck with things, the more you run the risk of introducing bugs. So we can't always match a wireframe or a mock exactly: it all depends on what you can coax Foundation into doing.

* Sometimes, things are less optimal than they could be, design and display-wise, because in a contest between "does this look good" and "is this accessible to people who use screenreaders, have low vision, navigate entirely by keyboard and can't use the mouse, etc", accessible wins every time. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's definitely possible to do both; accessibility and aesthetics aren't mutually exclusive. But in the event of a conflict, accessibility always wins.

* Our users (and I say this with great affection and the acknowledgement that I am totally also one of those people) are exceptionally persnickety about both how things look in general and about things they're used to changing. This doesn't mean that we can't/won't change or redesign things, but it does mean that when we're dealing with heavily used/frequently visited pages, or with things like the site skin that display on so many pages or the navstrip that displays on so many journals, we usually try to run things through a few rounds of opinions/feedback. Sometimes the feedback that we get can be really demoralizing for the person/people who designed the first version, because people aren't always restrained about how they deliver their feedback! So just be aware of that, heh.

* We don't have a super great process for design discussion/work (mostly because we don't have a lot of people wanting to do design) -- we used to use [site community profile] dw_design, but usage kind of trailed off. (People weren't using it because people weren't using it, yadda.) If you're interested, though, I could figure something out.

(Oh, also, I forgot to mention: the reason the text isn't vertical-align consistent in the navbar is because it's done with tables and the different elements in the leftmost and rightmost table cells (logout button, mini-icon, search box) nudge the text down a bit differently. Not unfixable, with a bit of tinkering, but the perpetual line of thought goes something like "it would be better to redo the code so it doesn't involve tables, and if we're doing that we might as well spruce it up a little or improve what links/modules are in it, and if we do that we're going to have to find someone to redesign the thing, ugh, let's just go do something else on the priority list instead". That line of thought happens a lot with shit that needs redesigning, heh.)
Edited 2017-04-17 09:13 (UTC)
fiddlingfrog: (Default)

Re: also, i must note that it's part of a bigger problem

[personal profile] fiddlingfrog 2017-04-18 02:09 pm (UTC)(link)
I think it might even be worth considering a navbar which can also serve as the display engine for all of these cases

This was the best part (in fact, I think it was the main goal) of the new LiveJournal site scheme introduced a few years ago. Having a consistent UI that tracks across the site, and can be adaptable both to the relationship you have with the page you're viewing and the size screen you're using would do a lot to improve the general DW experience.

Edit: Hmm. Okay, looking closer I see that the top banner and the navigation strip are still separate parts, but that they've been designed to fit together better with no repetition of links between them. Also, the top banner has taken the place of the navigation strip as the element that floats at the top of all page views.
Edited 2017-04-18 14:25 (UTC)
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

Re: version 2 roughs

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 03:32 am (UTC)(link)
Huh, so I posted my code before seeing/reading through the rest of this thread. Your mockups look really good! I like how you stick with the system style but still improve gradients, text size and alignment and button styles, which is *a lot* more than I've done. I've basically done a lot of work to get the navbar to blend in with the rest of the custom layout and so it resizes properly on mobile, but not too much else.
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

Re: version 2 roughs

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 06:18 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, goodie! I just have to change my account to view other people's journals in their styles and I'll go have a look - thanks! (I'm really loving what you did, though, just from the .png files. If you look at the updated code in my last reply you'll see there are a few things I didn't do, like separators, gradients, and button styles - though buttons/selects now have slightly rounded borders and some padding - because the tables are so convoluted my brain just starts hurting looking at them).
Edited (typos) 2017-04-18 06:19 (UTC)
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

Re: version 2 roughs

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 06:50 am (UTC)(link)
And yeah, because there aren't enough IDs and/or classes is another factor. It's funny because for search alone (just for ex) there's too many IDs and not enough classes, then there's whole swaths of the navbar CSS that are just a wasteland - nothing useful there to style.

I'll look over your CSS for ideas the next time I work on my navbar, though, because you pulled a lot of classes and IDs I didn't even think of using (I did my re-working tonight just before I saw your CSS). Looks like very useful stuff. :)
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

Re: version 2 roughs

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 07:46 am (UTC)(link)
Read through it, thanks. Hopefully your ideas give DW/the dev team lots of food for thought.

Re: viewing all but feeds/using custom URLs, definitely +1. I use custom feeds, myself (added to the header navlinks instead of the navbar, using a custom theme layer) and dropped feeds altogether from them after my DW subscribed/access feed became too overwhelming years ago (and which it still pretty much is).
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: version 2 roughs

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-18 08:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Oooh, I really like these. Have you tried it on a journal when you're logged out?
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-18 08:58 pm (UTC)(link)
I really like that grouping, and it makes a lot of sense!

I'm 100% for getting rid of the current multisearch box in group 3 and replacing it with a textbox that calls out to https://www.dreamwidth.org/search (the directory is, well, a mess, and most of the options in the multisearch box are less useful than they were in 2001), with a small "member search" link underneath for the directory...

Anyway, yes: I would love to see mockups, since you've articulated a bunch of stuff that annoys me subconsciously about where shit is in the navstrip. (Which is still the version LJ had at the time of our fork, with tweaks over the years here and there to shove in more stuff where it would fit: that's why the style stuff is in Cell 3, because the relationship info in Cell Two can get really long.)

Views I'd want to take a look at:

* the front page of your own journal while you are logged in
* the front page of a journal when you are not logged in
* the front page of someone else's journal/a community while you are logged in (with one each of both the shorter relationship texts -- "You subscribe to [staff profile] denise", etc -- and the longer ones -- "You and [staff profile] denise have mutual subscriptions and you have granted access to [staff profile] denise" or whatever)
* your own reading page (logged in and not)
* someone else's reading page (with both short and long relationship text)
* individual entries

I'd also like to see how it behaves on both small viewports and large ones, but that can be decided by whoever implements it. (Although if you want to come up with both desktop and mobile versions, I'm pretty sure we do have the technical capacity to choose which to show to people based on their device.)

Don't feel like you have to keep the three-cell concept if you think something else will work better. (Several cells and then the relationship text centered across the entire width of the view, top or bottom, is something I've thought of a few times!) I'd also prefer if it were no much larger than the existing 60px height, although that might be tougher.
Edited (i can use my own site's markup, really i can) 2017-04-18 20:58 (UTC)
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-25 01:41 am (UTC)(link)
Ha, yeah, sorry, I have to keep PMs turned off or else I get a bunch of requests for technical support or site help that just wind up sitting there when I have a three-day "ugh I can't sit up long enough to grab my laptop and type" thing like the last three days have been... (You can email me, though -- denise@dreamwidth.org.)

These look amazing and I personally love them. Lemme throw them to our senior volunteers and see what they think. (I would like to keep the style selector as top-level links, though; links are easier than a dropdown selector, and since those options are there for accessibility, it's good to keep them as easy/quickly reachable as possible.)

At this point, I gots two requests for you:

1) Can you send me a signed contributor licensing agreement? (The CLA is a bidirectional ass-covering document: it protects us from ever getting sued because we're using something that someone else came up with, and it protects you from us ever coming to you and saying "this thing you did had a bug and we're suing you because it caused problems" or "you sent us this thing and now you're stuck giving us support for it/maintaining it for us for the rest of your life". It also makes it very clear that you're not signing over copyright/ownership to your creations, just a permanent and irrevocable license to use and redistribute your creations, so everything is very clear about who owns what.)

2). Then, join [site community profile] dw_dev if you want -- that's our development community -- and [site community profile] dw_design, which hasn't been used in ages but I'd like to resurrect, so we can get this discussion out of the comments of a single [site community profile] dw_suggestions suggestion. :)
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-25 07:08 am (UTC)(link)

Absolutely! That was going to be my next step, once I ran it past the senior volunteers. (Just because I love something doesn't mean that my opinion is necessarily the same as others', so I didn't want to post to dw-design before getting a few other thumbs-up first. But the people who've weighed in so far all like it.)

If you want to write up a brief explanation of the various views and what they do, and toss me a second version of the mobile mockups, I can post them to dw-design for you. (I don't want to ask you to post directly, because feedback can get really heated, so usual practice is for me to post it instead so you don't get the comment notifications and have to choose to go read the feedback. But if you'd prefer to post it yourself, you totally can -- posting is open to all members.) Then, I'll link to the dw-design post in our next news post to get more eyeballs + more feedback.

I definitely like the idea of linking to the Latest Things page. The "trending tags" is a little more hit-or-miss (as you've probably noticed); it's not a very smart calculation, and because of caching, sometimes it highlights a tag that doesn't actually have any entries in it...

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-26 06:19 am (UTC)(link)
Love. Love, omg, love. (Everybody who's weighed in on them so far has also loved, btw.) The design/guideline docs are fucking awesome, too, holy shiiiiiit can we keep you?

I'll write up a draft dw-design post laying out the reasons for the change/introducing the mockups and run it by you in email to give me thumbs up/thumbs down on -- probably won't be tonight (catching up on other shit) but if we get it posted by Monday, I'll be able to include it in the next news post. Can you drop me an email (denise@dreamwidth.org) now just so I know what's the best email to use for you? (Also because my email server will impose delivery delays as an antispam feature if it's the first time someone's emailed me from that domain, and looking at your confirmed DW address, you might run into that; better to get started on waiting out the greylisting now.)
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-27 11:03 am (UTC)(link)

And I have fished it out of my spam folder after thinking "huh, I should have gotten that by now"!

Journal styles are more complicated than site pages, but we can definitely talk about that too! (We do have Mobility, a style that's designed to work well on mobile, but there's still a ton of stuff we can do; we've just been limited by a lack of designers and by a large percentage of the site still being in the old custom templating language that Brad dreamed up even before LJ existed. We're converting it, but sloooowly.) 

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-28 03:54 am (UTC)(link)

Ha! Yeah, go ahead and make one and then drop me the username, I'll give it some paid time. (Or you could get an account on our hosted-developer-environments service, but a full dev environment might be overkill for you...)

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-28 06:23 pm (UTC)(link)
And I hit up the account with paid time, so you'll be able to create plenty of styles and such!

We aren't wedded to Practicality/Neutral Good as a default style, btw -- we used to run polls every six-to-nine months for the userbase to decide on what the default style for new accounts should be, but we haven't done it for a while because it's kind of a pain and there's always eight billion other things further up the list. So we can always change it. I like the first look at it and will do a full accessibility review when I get a chance!

(A lot of stuff may also be doable at the system layer without needing all that CSS, too, but I am soooo not the person to look into that; [personal profile] momijizukamori does a lot of our CSS-to-S2 conversions. I'll page her in.)
momijizukamori: Shatterstar from the comic series X-Factor, looking very excited (Tony Stark Time)

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-04-29 03:29 am (UTC)(link)
D pointed me here - as she says, I'm one of the three or so people who've done the most digging around in the S2 system, as well as some digging in other sitescheme pages. I will also make grabby-hands, because I'm pretty comfortable writing code but like, design is hard and stuff, and having someone interested in that is a huge boon. I also don't use DW on mobile much so I'm a little out of touch with the problems there and what the right fixes are.
momijizukamori: Green icon with white text - 'I do believe in phosphorylation! I do!' with a string of DNA basepairs on the bottom (Default)

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-04-29 04:31 pm (UTC)(link)

For sure - though we probably can't make any changes to the desktop view and keep it the same layout, because current users will notice a 2px change in where something is, and they will revolt :P (I did the conversion of site-styled entry/comment pages from the old awful system to S2, and I'm not even exaggerating about 2px changes). On a related note, this was a thing brought to my attention by a friend last week - does it seem like a useful general stop-gap measure? It wouldn't be hard to implement across the style system more generally.

momijizukamori: Green icon with white text - 'I do believe in phosphorylation! I do!' with a string of DNA basepairs on the bottom (Default)

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-05-01 04:40 pm (UTC)(link)

Ah, okay! I misunderstood something farther up in the comment chain, carry on :) I can also maybe point more people at it for a greater range of test data if you'd like? I don't want to accidentally overwhelm you, though!

momijizukamori: Green icon with white text - 'I do believe in phosphorylation! I do!' with a string of DNA basepairs on the bottom (Default)

Re: Do it.

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-05-01 05:38 pm (UTC)(link)

Sure thing - is it also live on your test account?

momijizukamori: Green icon with white text - 'I do believe in phosphorylation! I do!' with a string of DNA basepairs on the bottom (Default)

Re: Do it.

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-05-01 05:46 pm (UTC)(link)

Nice! I will point at the test account but leave the caveat that things may go really weird occasionally.

momijizukamori: Green icon with white text - 'I do believe in phosphorylation! I do!' with a string of DNA basepairs on the bottom (Default)

Re: Do it.

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-05-01 05:53 pm (UTC)(link)

I can do that! Mostly I wanted to be able to point people at somewhere that already has it installed if they want to have a look but not install it themselves.

momijizukamori: Green icon with white text - 'I do believe in phosphorylation! I do!' with a string of DNA basepairs on the bottom (Default)

Re: Do it.

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-05-04 12:40 pm (UTC)(link)

There should be, at the S2 level if nothing else. I'll dig into it and let you know.

momijizukamori: Green icon with white text - 'I do believe in phosphorylation! I do!' with a string of DNA basepairs on the bottom (Default)

Re: Do it.

[personal profile] momijizukamori 2017-05-04 04:07 pm (UTC)(link)

By new post screen, do you mean http://www.dreamwidth.org/update ? There's a beta for a new version you can opt into at http://www.dreamwidth.org/beta - I don't know what we're still waiting on before it's default-ready. Unfortunately because it's a site page and not on a journal subdomain, it's not hookable, no.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: Do it.

[staff profile] denise 2017-05-07 03:21 am (UTC)(link)
If you do, you can switch back at any point! Or manually disable auto-formatting by wrapping your entry in <raw-code> / </raw-code> tags...
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[staff profile] denise 2017-04-25 01:45 am (UTC)(link)
holy shit this would make the navstrip 10000% more usable on mobile omg.
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

[personal profile] marahmarie 2017-04-18 03:10 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not proposing that the current inbox go away;

I know, but I'm actually excited about the idea of having an Inbox strip above or below the navbar strip, so the top of the strip, say, is the Inbox, with the original navbar stuff showing beneath that, or any variation on that theme that sort of lets the Inbox nav be styled separately.

My idea for it (assuming this gets implemented; I hope it will) would be to sort of display:none everything navbar related just for my view of it, but leave the Inbox strip of the navbar visible, because I absolutely love the idea of having it handy on every page as I browse Dreamwidth.
Edited (typos) 2017-04-18 03:12 (UTC)
brainwane: My smiling face, including a small gold bindi (Default)

[personal profile] brainwane 2017-04-16 08:34 am (UTC)(link)
Currently, using the Inbox as a notification centre results in large numbers of page swaps and reloads, as you go from Inbox to post to Inbox to reply form to Inbox etc., etc., etc., with mark-as-read and delete-item as separate actions across separate pages.

I hadn't thought about this until you mentioned it but maybe this is indeed why my Dreamwidth inbox is stuffed to overflowing and I don't interact with it much!
susanreads: my avatar, a white woman with brown hair and glasses (Default)

[personal profile] susanreads 2017-04-16 09:37 pm (UTC)(link)
I wouldn't use this, but as long as it's optional I don't care. But Each entry would contain an "x" dismissal button which would delete the notification from both the Inbox and the dropdown sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Deleting things from the inbox is permanent, isn't it? I can see people deleting things when they meant to get rid of the dropdown, especially if it appears on the navbar without having to be configured first.
anaraine: The (green-haired) Harvest Goddess from the Harvest Moon franchise, looking disgruntled with her hands on her hips. ([harvest moon] disgruntled)

[personal profile] anaraine 2017-04-17 06:15 am (UTC)(link)
I'm leaning towards 'no' because of how I use the inbox myself - but honestly, the biggest detractor for me is the Each entry would contain an "x" dismissal button which would delete the notification from both the Inbox and the dropdown. I'd be clicking that 'x' all the time to dismiss the notif - and then swearing a second later as I realized I also deleted the message. Which is a me problem, I get it, and I could probably retrain myself eventually. But it also sounds like a hundred Support requests waiting to happen, with no way to retrieve the deleted messages/notifs.
anaraine: Pony, from Another Wonderful Life, sitting on a fencepost and chatting with the Harvest Sprites. ([harvest moon] sitting on a fencepost)

[personal profile] anaraine 2017-04-17 06:37 am (UTC)(link)
My bad - thanks for the clarification.

I still have a bit of beef with how easy it is to delete, but I get that's part of what you're chasing after - so maybe this feature just isn't for me. (In which case, I'd love to be able to toggle this on/off. Which I know, decision fatigue, but I'll change my vote to "with changes" and wish you the best.)