Don't send push notifications to users who are clearly active on a device

[dbkr]

This is a bug to track the various different bugs related to aspects of tracking what we've seen/read between clients:

High priority:

• accurate synchronised unread state per-room (ie. number of regular messages unread or in vector, room boldness) (critical);
• accurate highlight state per-room (subset of notif counts) (hopefully we have it already);
• accurate badge counts on the favicon of the client

Lower priority:

• accurate notification counts per-room (not that we show them in the UI currently, so it could be skipped)
• self-read-up-to-marker
• jumping to arbitrary message offsets (unrelated, basically)
• push notification badge counts (not a blocker for v0)
• synchronising whether you push a user with whether they are currently active on a device, or have sent a read receipt, or whatever (not a blocker for v0)

Also need to show highlights somehow for rooms that are scrolled out of view on the RoomList or in a collapsed RoomSubList.

Immediate priorities:
Tracking unread per room, tracking highlights per room, ensuring they are synchronised between clients, and maintaining a favicon badge

App specific issues

• Android shouldn't notify me of a new message if I have the window open in another app element-android#3855

[dbkr]

What we need now for the unread / bing counts:

• Unread notification count per room in event stream
• Notification actions attached to each event in event stream

[ara4n]

One other aspect here could be only setting reset pushes for messages that you know the user has actually read. E.g. if I read messages in one room, I expect them to disappear from my list of mobile pushes. But it's unintuitive if other messages I haven't read yet then disappear from my mobile push list.

[dbkr]

Note that APNS has no concept of a reset push for a message: you can set the badge count to zero which causes all the notifications to disappear, otherwise they all stay.

[dbkr]

https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SPEC-303 tracks how we decide whether a given room is unread

[ara4n]

[Matthew]
so: suggestion is that we handle 3 different custom room states in vector-web: unread, notify and highlight
unread is calculated on the client, and would make the room title go black & bold.
the rules for what message types count as unread are hardcoded for now (everything except for: membership changes, call candidates/hangup, and m.notify?)
but in future could be defined as part of the pushrules.
notify == event you would be pushed for. these make room title go green and bold.
highlight == event you would be highlighted for. these make the room title go red and bold
by default highlighting are messages which reference you by name, or are 1:1
you can also configure custom things to cause a 'highlight' in push rules, as we do already today.
finally, we either track 'badge counts' for notify or highlight events.
and this is done serverside to avoid having to shove loads of explicit notify/highlight events down the eventstream
by default 1:1 convos would be highlit already.
so additional highlights within that convo would do nothing, unless you somehow turn off highlighting for your 1:1s, which presumably could be a configuration option via push rules.
so the only open question, assuming Amandine agrees with this, is whether badge counts should show highlights (aka mentions) or notifies.
for now, i suggest badge counts show the number of pending notifies, but we perhaps make it configurable in future depending on how it feels.
as intuitively I really think that I expect the badge count on an app to show me the number of pushes i've missed
rather than the number of i've missed.
"missed pushes" is basically how FB and Twitter do it, aiui.

[Amandine] ok, and let's see because I suspect it can really become useless at some point
[Matthew] quite possibly. but it should be trivial to change
[Dave] what amandine's suggesting is essentially a count of things which are directed at you personally, or individual events you've asked to be called out
[Amandine] but agreed athat "number of pushes I missed" is a clear explanation

[ara4n]

deprioritising from p1 to p2 as the 'jump to old read receipt' behaviour isn't a hard hard blocker on v0

[dbkr]

Badge counts are fixed on https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tree/push_badge_counts but requires the new notification code which is currently disabled.

[dbkr]

Should this still be v0?

[t3chguy]

element-hq/element-web#3432 has some discussion also

[oliverjanik]

What are the current rules regarding active users and notifications?

I seem to have issue where a recently active user does not get a notification even though their app is closed.

[Logicwax]

what is the current status of how push notifications are synced across devices? From December 2018 to around March 2019, my company hosted its own matrix servers (my apologies for not knowing the version numbers) and this was how I was introduced to matrix for the first time. I absolutely loved that when I read a private message on any of the desktop clients (including the web one), the push notification pop-up on my iOS lockscreen would vanish. Ever since we updated servers, and then eventually moved to modular.im hosting, this awesome feature has been missing. If I chat with someone on my desktop, I'll later find my phone has 10s to 100s of unread push notifications from our conversation (not in the client, but the OS-level push notification queue).

[Faldrian]

A few friends of mine are trying the matrix stack to evaluate if we move to it or not... and notifications not being cleared when read on another client is a huge problem. This will get annoing very fast.
Currently we are using synapse 1.17.0, riot web 1.7.2 and riot android 1.0.4.

What @Logicwax described as the former behavior would be the "we want that" state. Similar to how telegram behaves. :)

[jesanfafon]

Just like @Faldrian commented - I am in the same boat. I'm trying to move over to the matrix stack, but having to mute riot android every time I'm communicating on the desktop app is a severe regression over Signal, which I'm currently using.

[amstan]

Re @Faldrian

and notifications not being cleared when read on another client is a huge problem.

I filed issue element-hq/element-web#16026, notifications just never get cleared by element web (either when you read in the same client or another client), It was a 1 liner fix.

[pszypowicz]

I tried to migrate couple of users to the matrix im. The ones who actually use it, and install it on the phone and laptop are very bothered that the notifications goes on for every message they receive on the phone, while typing on the pc. This problem is even worse when a user have an apple watch.

I'm trying to provide a workaround for them, or they will simply leave matrix. The only thing I can come up with, is to turn off the notifications on mobile/watch. But is sounds like a disaster when they will miss something important.

Is there a better way to handle that?

[pszypowicz]

I wanted to leave my 5 cents additionally here :)

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/28824980-don-t-send-push-notifications-to-users-who-are-clearly-active-on-a-device

There is a bountysource available from now on!

[aethralis]

This is the most problematic issue for me at the moment. I have to keep silencing my phone because otherwise it just drives me crazy. Really wondering how difficult it would be to resolve this?

[rbuddy101]

Doubled the bounty myself as this is the most problematic issue for most users.
Thanks in advance

[rwjack]

Any updates on this?
I'm confident it is possible to resolve this if enough energy is directed towards the issue.
We're literally being chased by 7 year old bug, as if it were a ghost!

[kellyclowers]

Yeah this is a big problem for me, extremely annoying to a sound sensitive person like myself to be chatting on the computer with someone and their responses are making my phone beep at me.

(also I think there should be a short delay + roll up period, so if someone types many short messages in quick succession, you only get one sound for notification instead of 5 or 6 or whatever... but that's another issue)

[Cyberes]

We're at $230 USD.

https://app.bountysource.com/issues/28824980-don-t-send-push-notifications-to-users-who-are-clearly-active-on-a-device

[rwjack]

[ghost]

Wow.. the issue is nearly 8 Years old and still unresolved...

And it still makes the user experience awful..

[dtheodor]

Why is this S-Minor? You are a messenger, getting notifications right is an important requirement don't you think? Teams and Slack do this right.

[marinkol]

After convincing my upper management, to try out matrix, to replace our current messenger, I got most of the things working as people expected. (well after convincing everyone that gif's were not business critical feature )

But this here is a deal breaker. Given everyone has at least phone and laptop, where they want to access such messages, constant notifications drives everyone insane. And I haven't even integrated ticketing system into matrix jet.

Will have to put migration on hold until this is fixed, or better client for matrix comes along.

[Cyberes]

@marinkol Sounds like they could have possibly lost your business. You should send them a message to the commercial part of Element to let them know how big a deal this is: https://try.element.io/contact-sales

[rwjack]

Someone very based just added $500 to the bounty.

https://app.bountysource.com/issues/28824980-don-t-send-push-notifications-to-users-who-are-clearly-active-on-a-device

[pszypowicz]

It looks like there is related issue too: #1096

edit: this is the only issue (which I keep as "subscribed") I care about in matrix. I dropped my conversation from it and moved to whats up (which I hate for multiple reason - but they at least handle essentials right: notification system). I can't recommend matrix/element any more, unless that gets solved.

[K4LCIFER]

I'm not sure why this has the "Minor" severity tag. The issue of not detecting that another app is in use makes notifications borderline unuseable to the point where I have to keep them permanently turned off -- I can't stand the constant notification alerts on my phone when I'm talking through the desktop app.

[K4LCIFER]

@rwjack
Someone very based just added $500 to the bounty.

https://app.bountysource.com/issues/28824980-don-t-send-push-notifications-to-users-who-are-clearly-active-on-a-device

That's rather unfortunate. As you can see in the current list of issues for BountySource, they have broken all trust with the community, and are being accused of stealing everyone's funds, as shown below:

[FlitPix]

I agree that this should be prioritized more - why is this in S-Minor? Marking things as read whenever I move to Element Android is very annoying.

[Cyberes]

My understanding is that this is linked to the whole presence issue. I assume that that has to be solved before they can touch this notification issue. Both should be marked as critical importance.

[GGORG0]

Hi, are there any updates on this? Has there been any work done?
It's an 8 year old issue at this point and I'm surprised such a "simple" (idk how simple it actually is) thing hasn't been done yet...

[jan-Sanku]

This should be S-Critical at this point! I can only speak for myself, but I'd consider this essential for a messaging application. Element is great, otherwise, but over 8.5 years for this is pretty damn bad!

And surely it can't be that hard; Discord, Steam, and pretty much everything else already handle this behavior just fine.

A simple method of detecting whether a user is active on a device is to check for mouse and/or keyboard input globally. You can try this with the aforementioned Steam and Discord: Have your status set to "Online", don't touch your computer for 10 minutes, now your status will be "Idle". Touch your mouse and they both jump back to online. (Discord has a separate (adjustable!) timer for how long it should hold notifications, but that's beside the point)

If all web/desktop clients have not detected any input for n minutes, start sending notifications to mobile devices. If any web/desktop client is active, do not. Simple as that.

[t3chguy]

If all web/desktop clients have not detected any input for n minutes, start sending notifications to mobile devices. If any web/desktop client is active, do not. Simple as that.

The sending of notifications to mobile devices is done by the Matrix server and nothing in the Matrix spec says to behave as you describe, so this is going to be something which someone needs to write an MSC for and then tweak the behaviour in whichever Matrix server implementation you are using.

[rwjack]

For anyone brave enough to write that MSC, here's some food for thought:

Since this is a "presence" thing, what happens if servers have presence disabled?

For the changes that will fix this issue to work, presence should be "server based", which could control the logic of the push notification delivery system, and if servers decide to disable presence, that shouldn't break the push notifications, it's just that the presence status won't be delivered to end clients.

Then again, with "server based" - all the time presence, we're running into some potential privacy issues, such as easier admin snooping of who is online, even if "end user presence" is technically disabled.