Notifications w/o Likes and Helpful Emails

[traciebosket]

Hello,

Is there a way to get a notification whenever there is a post on a thread I am following, but not getting a notification of "Likes" or "Helpful"?

Thank you!

Tracie

[canvas_admin]

Tracie,

It seems to me that "likes" and "helpfuls" come from following people so you'd have to stop following a person to stop his or her likes/helpfuls from showing up in your Jive inbox (and/or personal e-mail depending on your preference settings).

I could be wrong, however, so somebody please correct me.  Otherwise, I just unfollowed some people for no reason at all. :smileyplain:

[Stefanie]

traciebosket​, inasmuch as this is a question about the (Jive-powered) Canvas Community and not the Canvas LMS, I'm moving it to the Meta Community​ space and have shared it with the Meta Community Group​.

[kona · Accepted solution]

traciebosket, I took a quick look through my own notifications and from what I'm seeing I agree with canvas.admin@rts.edu​ that it appears you should only be seeing helpfuls and likes from people you are following.

Yet, you don't have to unfollow people to eliminate this or slow it down to a more manageable number of notifications in your inbox/email.

Here's what you can do:

1. Create a "stream" for people/things/places you want to follow, but don't want to receive notifications for. Here's a guide that explains how to create a stream - How do I manage my Activity stream in the community?
2. Go into your Preferences (click on the pull down icon next to your profile picture - top right of the screen - and click on Preferences).
3. Under "Inbox Notifications" you should see the name of your new stream. You can then choose whether you want any of the notifications from this stream sent to you via email and if so how often (all activity - real time, daily summary, etc). Personally I don't have ANY email sent to me from the Community because it got overwhelming. Yet, if you want to receive some email, this is where you can configure it the way you want it.
4. View your profile (click on the pull down icon next to your profile picture - top right of the screen - and click on view profile).
5. On your profile there should be a section called "Connections" (should be in the middle of the page). Click on where it says XXX Following (XXX = number of people you are following).
6. On the page that comes up are the people you are following. For anyone that you don't want to receive notifications about to your email (or Community inbox), click on "Following" button next to that person's names and only select the new stream you created in Step 1, then click Done. This means that you're still following the person, but all the notifications from that person will now go to the new stream you created - which you've already adjusted for how often you want to receive email about those notifications (ex: daily summary).
7. You can do basically the same thing for any places or groups that you follow. When you click on the Follow button for that group/place/etc (normally you have to go to that specific group/place to do this), just select the new stream you created.
8. If you ever want to see all of the notifications from people in the new stream you created, just go to - https://community.canvaslms.com/news - and click on the name of the Stream from the top of the page.

Hope this helps! And don't feel bad for adjusting how you view notifications and content in the Community. My own husband won't follow me in the Community because he doesn't want to constantly see everything I'm doing.

[canvas_admin]

kona@richland.edu​, thanks for this.   Just a quick note that I'd done these steps for a manually created stream for people I follow and helpful/likes still show up in my Jive inbox.   I think if somebody wants likes/helpfuls to be completely removed (or significantly decreased) from either personal e-mail or Jive inbox, then they do have to unfollow a person. I don't have my manually created streams e-mail me, but it seems that any created stream will put that activity in one's Jive inbox.

Thoughts?

[kona]

Ah... that's an interesting and quite possibly correct idea. I'm not sure because I follow everyone and just about everything in the Community so my Inbox is always cluttered with stuff. Yet, since "inbox" is one of the methods you can choose to follow (or not follow) someone it seems like it shouldn't work that way.

Anyone else want to weigh in on this?

[scottdennis]

I'm in the follow-everything-in-the-inbox camp myself so I'm not 100%.  I seems like it should be true that if you follow someone in a stream but not in your inbox, then you shouldn't see their 'likes' and 'helpfuls' anywhere but in the stream.  I think Jive is a little sneaky in that in order to get to the option of following in a stream you have to click the Like button which means that by default you then have to specifically un-check the inbox if you want only a stream.

[kmeeusen]

Mark & Tina:

I'm in the same position as Scott and Kona, and follow way too many people and things (not 100%), but have also noted that the only way to not get the "likes" etc. is to unfollow.

KLM