[Feature Request] Notifications

[jaredlt]

Current state

• Useful information is currently relegated to the logger which only appears in console output. Eg. archives corrupted or unsupported.
• Separately, there is no facility to announce/notify users within the app Eg. new release changelog

Problem

• The logger information is important but easily overlooked.
• Users may not be aware of new features as they become available.

Solution

Notification system.

Requirements

• Notifications page
• Global notification icon in nav (with dynamic badge count)
• Don't allow duplicate notifications eg. Corrupted archive on next scan should not create a second notification (unless already dismissed? see questions below)
• More here...

Questions

• Just for Admins? Or all users? Or ability to set which notifications will show for admin vs all?
• What are examples of the types of notifications we expect? (so we can try and plan the UI / generalise the columns etc.)
  • Archive scan related eg. Archive corrupted, unsupported
  • New release announcements
  • What else?
• What are a few examples of good notification systems we can be inspired from? Eg. Github?
• Are all notifications dismissable? I guess the scan related ones you'd always want to know about, but if you dismiss, it would show again after the next scan so not really an issue?

Original comments in #49

@hkalexling some initial comments added, but no doubt will need to change / be expanded.

[hkalexling]

Apart from the types listed above, we can also notify users when a MangaDex download is completed or finished with an error. These notifications should be sent to admins only.

When we have the MangaDex updater (#24), we should also notify users when new chapters are available to read. This type of notifications should be visible to all users.

I can't think of a good example right now, but what I have in mind is indeed close to what GitHub has (icon in nav and the actual notifications are on a separate page).

Here's how I imagine the notification feature would work (open for discussions)

• The dynamic badge shows the number of new notifications available
• When a user clicks on the icon and opens the notification page, all new notifications are marked as read (is this what you meant by "dismiss"?), and the badge disappears for that particular user
• The dismissed notifications are still there, and the user can always visit the page to read them
• Notifications can be manually deleted
• An error notification (e.g., corrupted archives) should replace the existing notification on next scan if it's already dismissed, and it should be moved to the top of the list (assuming the notifications are sorted from most reason to oldest)

[flying-sausages]

I'd suggest that system and "user" notifications are separated in the UI. Those two will be highly different in content and context. They also have very different priorities in terms of how important they are. This will also make it easier to separate what goes to who.

I would assume "user" notifications would overlap the system notifications in terms of functionality, as the system notifications will mostly be "Error @ blah" or "Update to version 0.6.2 available", while the "user" notifications might be more richer of sorts.