rocket.chat gets notifications totally wrong.
totally.
wrong.
Making it right would be extremely simple: give USERS the ability to decide on the fly when they have received enough notifications from a given channel. What a concept, I know; users actually deciding what works for them. Henry Ford would be spinning in his grave.
Here’s the scenario: you, a developer, are head-down writing code. Your colleague, a customer service agent, posts in a channel that you are subscribed to about some issue. Then they upload three images illustrating the issue. Then they write several paragraphs - each a separate post because the default behavior of rocket chat when a user hits the return key on their keyboard is to send - describing what the images are showing. Then a few more paragraphs of clarifications and stuff they forgot.
In this universe, the bad universe we currently live in, you receive 13 separate notifications from rocket.chat within a couple minutes. This distraction and your perseveration on how much you hate rocket.chat’s notifications causes you to make several critical coding errors that will take you or someone hours to debug at some later time.
In one alternate universe, on the second notification, you click a little pop-down on it that lets you snooze notifications from that channel for 5 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour or 2 hours. You make your choice, mentally filing away that you should go and read that channel when you have a minute, and then go on about your work. You write some brilliant, elegant code and get a big bonus.
In another alternate universe, one where rocket.chat developers are both wise and compassionate, you are able to configure your default notification preferences by channel in such a way that after the first notification in a given channel, notifications for that channel are automatically snoozed for a user-selectable length of time. Since you know this customer service channel can get chatty and you never need to respond to it immediately, you have this channel configured for no more than 1 notification in any 30-minute period. You notice a notification in the channel, make a mental note to read it when you have a minute and get back to work.
Either or both of these alternate universes could be ours right now. Six years later, not one developer cycle put into making this basic feature a reality. But thank god we have lots of ways to put a cat emoji into our business messaging.