Push Notifications
Note: I'm on the fence about this feature. I don't personally find them useful but some people like to get real quick feedback whenever someone mentions them or a post gets made in a thread they follow (people have complained when email alerts have lagged forum actions in the past). This is going to be the most aggressive way to stay in touch with what happens here. I'll leave it as a site option for now but if you're really bothered by this feature DM me. I may turn it off.
This one is a really new feature that uses a modern browser API to deliver push notifications to your brower. Push notifications occur every time you'd get an alert from the site and, optionally, every time someone sends you a direct message.
Android users take care: this will send push notifications to your phone. Apple users, you won't get push notifications on your phone because Apple doesn't allow browser-based push notifications and the system doesn't work with Apple's push notification API.
If you'd get an alert in the header of the site here, like this:
Then after you enable push notifications you'll also get an alert on your desktop. On macOS they come as system notifications like this:
And you can use the System Preferences Notifications settings pane to configure when and how they're delivered to your desktop.
The site software seems to be a little aggressive about asking you to enable push notifications. You'll see this at the bottom of your browser if you don't have them enabled:
If you press the X button to dismiss this dialog you'll see this:
If you click "Never ask again" you won't get nagged again by the software about this.
If you opt into push notifications your brower will also ask you to confirm you actually want to recieve them. In Firefox I get this when I try to enable push notifications:
You can tell your browser to never, ever allow push notifications from the site if you want to double down on making sure the site can't push notifications to you. In Firefox press the v arrow next to Not Now and you'll see a permanent rejection option:
You can enable or disable push notifications any time
in your Preferences view.
And let me put a pitch in for
Firefox while I'm here, which has an excellent control pane for controlling access to push notifications. You can control it on a per-site basis or even turn it off permanently for every site with one option check.