A while back a change was made where most sales notifications now arrive via message instead of notifications.

I'd like to ask for this to be reversed, for several reasons, the absolute massive main one being:

Because of this change, messages from actual real humans are now a bitter disappointment, and that should never be the case.

It used to be notifications were a fairly regular thing, mostly just loves on photos or forum posts, but with the odd sale or subscription notice mixed in - so every now and then a nice extra, but not something you assumed would be the case.

However, since they moved to messages, 95%+ of the messages I receive are sales notifications. So despite me trying not to think that way, the envelope lighting up has come to mean "yay, a sale!" But very occasionally, it's not a sale, it's an actual message from someone - and again, despite trying not to think that way, those messages are disappiontments after the initial high of thinking it's a sale.

Likewise it makes the effects of the bug that sends two copies of every payout notification message, and the one where the system always tried to upload every store file twice and then generates an "unable to move to bin, this file is alrteady in your bin" error message, much worse, as those are disappointments too. But at least a system generated message being disappointing is harmless. Anything that makes messages from people less welcome than ones from the system on the other hand is quite a major issue.

Plus, they are sales notificatons. Surely it makes more logical sense for them to be in notifications, not messages?

This has been bugging me since the change was made, and I've seen others say they don't like the new method either. I've sat on it for months to see if my feelings on it would change, but they haven't, if anything they've grown clearer.

Please can sales notifications go back in notifications, and out of messages?

I appreciate the suggestion about sales notifications going back into... Notifications For better or worse, here's the overall vision, still being implemented over time:

1) The intent is to move all system-related notifications to your inbox, not just sales notifications.

2) System notifications are confined to a single thread in your inbox where you can see them all in one place. Having them buried among the tons of updates from other users was causing a lot of people (especially producers) to miss important system messages.

3) Notifications expire after 2 weeks. I you didn't see it by then (easy to do if it's buried), that important system notice would be gone. When on inbox, it'll remain there indefinitely until you see it and delete it.

4) The Notifications page will eventually become more like a pure "Following" page like on other social media. All you should see there are people and things you actually follow, not a reminder that your banner ran out of credits

5) The Wall (and bottom of the main homepage) is like the For You page, where the site aggregates content you might like (currently not a real algo per se, but just uses filters that you set).

I thought about adding a new bubble just for system messages in the top right corner next to the Inbox / Notification / Cart icons, but for some reason that feels cringe to me. UMD does store the number of new sales you've gotten since you last checked, so it would theoretically be easy to add a sales bubble that shows up whenever the number is nonzero. Still a little cringe to add that though. More suggestions on that welcome

> Likewise it makes the effects of the bug that sends two copies of every payout notification message, and the one where the system always tried to upload every store file twice and then generates an "unable to move to bin, this file is alrteady in your bin" error message, much worse, as those are disappointments too.

Damn, this is the first I'm hearing about any of that, but I'll be checking on those bugs soon as I can.

[Followup: The double payout notification happens because you get it once when it's sent, and again when I finally get the confirmation ID to put in. I'll rearrange my workflow a bit to avoid that ]

Please do that. Seriously, a system that makes receiving messages from a real human a crushing disappointment, as it is just now, is not a good solution. I get the points about notifications expiring or being missed, esp if someone doesn't check as often as I do, but I really don't like the instant gut reaction to getting a message from someone I care about being "damn, thought that was a sale." Having system messages and human messages separtated would be far better.


I'd just assumed other people would have complained too, happens pretty much every time I upload a new file to the bin, which I usually do using drag and drop, and then leaving it running in its own tab.


Regarding the payout notes, presumably each one has an ID of some kind, so couldn't the sending mechanism not just add the ID of each one sent to a database table, and than have an if statement that checks the table for "ID already seen" and skips sending again if that's the case?

Totally agree with the opening post. The flood of sales notifications in my PMs is just mind blowing. I think I would turn this type of notification off if it was an option in my profile settings. I would prefer to only see messages from real people in PMs. I would like each type of notification to be configurable in my profile settings and have three options: send to Messages, send to Notifications, or mute.

An alternative idea is to create a special notification channel that only shows up for producers. Most users never see all the "that advertiser died because you didn't feed him" or "some guy threw you his last pennies". People don't even know about the drama that producers go through because of these notifications.

There is an option in your prefs to turn off sales notifications. I've just turned them off for you


I also recommend that you turn off sales notifications, at least for now. Then when the red inbox bubble lights up, you can be sure it's either a real human... or another type of system notification that doesn't seem to bother you as much. Really, if 95% of your messages are from making sales, then I'd hope that 5% human interaction wouldn't be such a soul-crushing experience I think I get what you're saying tho.

Now that new sales have their own red bubble on the left of your profile, sending you a notification for each sale seems kind of redundant anyway. You can see all the sales by clicking Sales.



More granularity over your notifications is coming at some point. Still considering everything else yall have said, so thanks for your input on the notifications


I have plenty of things on my To Do list, but that's one complaint I haven't gotten yet. Checking my logs, I see your rejected dupes. But they are like 2 hours apart. That suggests that your computer is actively uploading the files on separate occasions. I've noticed that on some browsers, if something takes too long, or if the computer goes to sleep, it may automatically retry the last action when it wakes or when you go back to that tab. I know this happens on pages, but not sure if that would apply to ajax uploads. Sorry, that's the best explanation I have right now.

Edit: I've confirmed that browsers will also try to re-send ajax requests just like pages, if it's already taken a long time or if the browser thinks the connection has been interrupted. This is the likely culprit.

Just spotted different colour message notifications - guessing it now shows differently whether it's a system message or a personal one? If so, yay, and thanks for listening.

Yep. It was actually the plan all along to show system notices separately. Just had to decide how and then find time to program it in