Instant notifications

On our continued quest to further TheBroth goodness, we’re further working to blur the lines between web applications and live multiplayer online gaming. Our new feature, instant notifications, is going to help us move closer to that goal.

From now on, you’ll get instantly notified when your friends come online, when you have a new message, when you’re invited to a room, get a friend request, get a new comment or reply on your blog, your artwork(s) or your forum post - no matter on which page of TheBroth you currently are. Read on to discover in detail how this works and how it will improve your TheBroth experience.

A brief history of “Friends”

Before we explain the notifications, let’s recap how this evolved:

Recently, we introduced the concept of “friends” to TheBroth. People you like you can send a friend request, and if they accept, they’ll be your friends and they will show up on your friends list. Your friends are privileged as they can see what you’re up and vice versa. You can also make your rooms friends only, which puts an end to unwanted tile movers. The new room rewind feature makes vandalism a thing of the past, however, it’s very convenient to set a room to “friends only”, because the room will be shown on the active rooms page, and can attract new people or friends to join in, without you having to worry about anyone misbehaving. In the past, you could set a room members-only, but as it is so easy to join up and become a member, you get the occasional registered user who is just not interested in team play.

When you login, you see your profile page and you can see how many of your friends are online. On your friends page you see exactly who is online and what they’re up to. This is pretty cool, but we thought it would be even cooler if you’d get notified if one of your friends comes online, regardless of which TheBroth page you’re currently viewing. And that’s exactly what this new feature is all about - instant notifications.

These notifications will show up in the top center of the browser window, no matter on which page of TheBroth you are. If there are several messages, they will each display for a few seconds. These notifications contain clickable links, so you can take immediate action, for example, you may click on this person’s name which takes you to their profile page, on which you can then invite them to the mosaic room (in case you are in a mosaic room right now). You could also send them a private message, which in turn, they’ll get instantly displayed on their screen.

You’re not going to miss the notifications if you aren’t viewing the top part of a page. Even if you have scrolled down, the notification will appear in the center, and the top of the section of the page you’re currently viewing, right under your browser’s toolbar. The notifications are only displayed on the active browser window, the one that has the user focus, which is typically the one you’re looking at.

Notification types

In order to keep you informed of what’s going on around TheBroth, the following events will trigger notifications:

• Friend has come online
• Friend invites you to room roomname
• Member has sent you a private message
• Member has sent you a friend request
• Member has accepted your friend request
• Member has declined your friend request
• Member has commented on your blog post
• Member has replied to your forum post
• Member has commented on tracked snapshot
• Member has submitted a new snapshot.

Future improvements of the instant notification feature: Sound

When you’re busy creating yet another masterpiece or otherwise captivated by the artworks of TheBroth (especially now with cool replay feature), it’s easy to miss these notifications. Now, they aren’t really crucial, so it’s not that bad if you do miss one, but it’d be nice if you didn’t have to miss any. So, in the future we’ll add sound to the notifications. In your profile page you’ll be able switch on that feature, enabling a sound effect that will play whenever a notification is being displayed.

When you invite someone to your room, you’re actually sending out the request while you’re looking at this person’s profile. So if they follow your invitation and join you in your room, you don’t get a notification of that. As you’re looking at the profile page there, we’re considering to make this yet another notification, when somebody follows your invitation. Alternatively, once we’ve have sound effects for “person joins room”, the sound effect alone may be feedback enough. These things are hard to predict without actually trying them out in real situations. So we’re going to just try this new system in the wild for a few days to see if anything needs to be adjusted or improved.