Unread notification on channels

Would it be possible to get clearer notification if there are unread messages in one of the channels? Currently, the channel name is displayed in a somewhat brighter color, but it doesn’t really attract attention of all of our users. They react immediately to private messages, but if we write something in Town Square, they seem to miss it.

That’s on purpose, so that you don’t get bombarded with notifications on public channels. Imagine a public channel with 50 users chatting.
To call the attention of the user you can use @ and the user name in the message and they’ll get notified, like @johndoe or you can use @channel in the message and everybody in the channel will get notified

Especially with Town Square, it seems dumb to use @ per user that should read it. Those messages are general and for all.

I would opt for just a clearer visible notification in the same way that unread messages are indicated on private channels, instead of just making the channel name bold. Could as well be a configurable setting. I understand that we don’t want popups or emails and other disturbing things.

I’m not a mattermost developer, but the way I understand it is like this:

  • Bold: People are talking in that channel since last I opened it
  • Number: Someone is talking directly to me or mentioning me in the conversation

That’s why privates have the unread notification because the message is always direct to you

In our organization we have several channels depending on people roles, so instead of sending a message in Town Square to multiple users, I send it the “Database” channel (if I want to notify those involved in the database)

But I guess each organization has different needs.

I also got this kind of feedback from my team members. It is not easy for them to find unread channel as the color is not very difference. Can we add a function to let user to choose if they want to got notifications? Or can we add a Icon in front of channel name then user will notice it.

Yep, got same feedback here… Could do with being bolder / having an unread count / asterisk.

Hi all, we have a “Group unread channels” setting that could be an option: https://docs.mattermost.com/administration/config-settings.html#group-unread-channels-experimental.

This setting ensures that all unread channels are grouped in the left-hand side at the top of all channels, so it is easy to see what channels have new unread messages.

This was added in v4.7 or 4.8, so if you’re on an earlier version you might need to upgrade to see this option.

I think we’d just prefer a slightly more obvious unread indicator. People get used to the order of the entries in the sidebar. Having them shuffle around is (to me) vaguely annoying as, when you go to click on a channel, it can take an extra beat while your mind goes “Oh, the channel has gone… ah, there it is”