Notifications

One inbox, three products

Your notification inbox is not Openbook's. It belongs to your Bookbag account, and it is the same inbox in every Bookbag product. A mention in Openbook and a mention in another product land in one list, and reading it in one place reads it everywhere.

That is why every link a notification carries is a full address rather than a path: a bell in another product has to be able to open this one.

What Openbook keeps is the part that is Openbook's to decide — whether this person hears about this room. Mutes, pins and push devices are local; the notifications themselves are not.

The bell and the notifications page

The bell in the top bar shows your most recent 15 notifications and the unread count. The full page at /notifications shows them 25 at a time with a "load more", a date on each, and a filter for unread only. Both let you mark one read, mark everything read, and delete one.

Every notification is a link to the item it is about. A mention on a card opens that card, not the board it lives on. The fastest way to clear an inbox is to click through it: each click lands you where a response is needed.

What generates a notification

Twenty-one kinds of event notify someone, grouped into six categories you can mute independently:

Category	What falls under it
Mentions & replies	@mentions, comments, Q&A answers, and new topics on tags you follow
Assignments	A Gantt task, a retro action item, a check-in or a table row assigned to you; a Gantt task of yours becoming unblocked
Reminders & due dates	A card due soon, event and session reminders, a check-in opening or falling due
Approvals & decisions	A time-off request awaiting your decision and the decision on yours, a proofing decision, a group join request and its outcome, and a change to your workspace role
Announcements	Feed posts, bulletins, and project status updates
Automations	A board automation rule firing

Two rules are worth knowing:

• You are never notified about your own action. Assigning a card to yourself is silent.
• System notifications have no category and are always delivered. They cannot be muted, and neither can any future notification type that has not been filed into a category yet — the safe default is to deliver.

Muting and pinning rooms

Every room in the sidebar has a mute and a pin.

• Mute a room and nothing in it notifies you. Your membership and your access are untouched; only the notifications stop.
• Pin a room and it moves to the top of the sidebar. Again, nothing about access changes — only where the room is listed.

Both are yours alone. Muting a room silences it for you and for nobody else.

Muting a category

Muting a whole room is sometimes too coarse and twenty-one individual switches would be too many, so the six categories above are the middle setting. Mute Announcements and you stop hearing about feed posts everywhere, while mentions and assignments still reach you.

Email

When something notifies you, it can also reach you by email. Openbook does not send those messages itself — it names a template and hands the variables to the Bookbag account service, which owns the templates and the sending setup.

If notification emails look wrong or are not arriving, that is a configuration matter at the account service, not in Openbook.

Browser and device push

Push is per device, and you decide each one separately. Enable it on your work machine and skip it on your personal laptop; enable it in one browser profile and not another.

• In a browser or an installed web app, Openbook registers a service worker and subscribes with a key it generates itself. There is no third-party push routing account in the middle.
• On iOS, the installed app registers with Apple directly.
• On Android, push arrives through the installed web app rather than the store shell.

The permission prompt waits for your first click rather than firing on page load, and a refusal is remembered. Say no once and the app does not ask again on that device.

Signing out removes that device's registration, so a shared machine stops receiving your notifications.

Choosing your channels

• In the app all day? The bell alone may be enough.
• In and out of Openbook? Add push on your main machine so mentions reach you without keeping the tab in focus.
• Away from your desk? Email is the backstop.

Staying responsive without drowning

1. Deal with push as it arrives — those are the ones you asked to be interrupted for.
2. Sweep the bell when you switch tasks; click each item through to its source and handle it there.
3. When one room is generating most of the noise, mute the room rather than the category. When one kind of notification is, mute the category rather than every room.

Because every notification deep-links to its subject, processing notifications and doing the work are the same motion: click, respond, next.