Alkmaar
New years resolution: Add more Pinside features!
Pinside Notifications (beta)
Get notified about things happening on Pinside that are of interest to you!Pinside Notifications are messages alerting you about things happening on Pinside like:- When someone posts in a topic you subscribe to
- When you are @mentioned on the forum
- When your post gets quoted on the forum
- When you receive thumbs up for a post
- When you get a new PinsideMail message
- When a wish list game comes up for sale
- When new results are found in the Marketplace for any of your stored searches
- When a new Pinball location on our map pops up nearby you
- When a new event is added to the calendar
... And more!
A notification via Chrome on an Android phone
Before we get started
Pinside+ feature
Notifications are a Pinside+ feature. That's Pinside's paid membership, with special features for supporters, frequent visitors and power users. If you are not a Pinside+ member yet, notifications are a great reason to subscribe! You will also get unlimited PM’s, PM attachments, big Marketplace fee discounts and you'll be supporting the upkeep and development of your favourite pinball website. Check out Pinside+ here!
Beta
Please note that Pinside Notifications are brand new and still in BETA. This means this feature is still subject to change and that it may be (temporarily) disabled should any issues arise. If you run into bugs or have any questions or suggestions, please post here in this thread. Also see the FAQ section at the end of this post, that I will update if needed.
Getting started
Okay, with all that out of the way. Let’s enable Notifications! To do so, head over to the title bar of any screen and click the bell icon. It will display with a line through it, indicating you have not enabled notifications yet.
bell icon in menu bar (resized).png
Click that icon and you will navigate to the Notifications page. First we're gonna hit the blue button to head to notification settings and flip the switch there to enable Notifications. This notification settings page is also where you'll set up which notifications you want to receive, how often, and on which of your device(s). More about that later.
Notification Center and Push Devices
All your notifications will be sent to Notification Center on Pinside. Notification Center is the central hub of all notifications you receive, much like PinsideMail is a list of all your PM message threads. You can easily get there from any page, via the bell icon in the top menu bar (conveniently placed next to the PinsideMail icon).
Notification center - intentionally blurry picture
So, for example: when someone mentions you in a post a notification will be generated for you and sent to your notification center. This is what a notification looks like:
Notification in notification center (resized).png
Notification Center is pretty cool and handy but the real power of notifications is, uhm... Getting notified when you're not already browsing Pinside! That's where Push Notifications come in. They are sent by Pinside to your browser and/or phone and work on all major browsers on desktop computers and (where applicable) on Android Phones: They have been tested in Chrome (desktop and Android), Firefox, Edge and Safari.
Push notification (resized).png
Bad news if you use an iOS device: To date, Apple refuses to support the Web Push Notifications web standard, even if developers have petitioned with them for quite some time. This means Pinside Push Notifications are currently not supported on iOS devices. However, you can use the workaround, which instead sends notifications to Telegram, a great free messenger app for all platforms, including iOS!
The Telegram App with PinsideBot provides you with Notifications on iOS!
When you're not an an iPhone/iPad, you can simply enable Web Push. Click the big blue button under “This Browser” to enable notifications for your current browser. This works on your desktop browser or on your Android phone. The device will now show up in your list of devices. Notifications will always be sent to all of the devices in your device list.
Add this browser (resized).png
Configuring notifications
All notifications can be fully configured on the Notification Settings screen. There are a bunch of different notifications in different categories. All pretty self explanatory, but I’ll go by them.
Configuring notifications (resized).png
Each notification type can be enabled/disabled globally, using the blue toggle switch on the left. Disabling a notification will completely mute it and stop it from appearing in Notifications Center (and thus also preventing it from being sent out to a device). Most people will want to leave all notifications turned on and only use the checkboxes at the right to tweak how notifications are sent out.
Some notifications may have additional configuration. Hitting the “configure” button will allow you to tweak those settings.
Let’s take a look at the notifications we have so far (December 2021):
Personal
PM Message: Get a notification when you receive a PM (PinsideMail) message.
New Follower: Get a notification when another Pinsider started following you.
Achievement Unlocked: Get a notification when you unlock a Pinside achievement.
Forum
New post: Probably the most popular of all! Receive a notification when a new post is made in a topic you subscribe to. You can choose how often to get notified: each post, or maybe only hourly, daily or even only once until you re-visit a topic.
Mentioned in post: Get a notification when you are @mentioned in a post by another Pinsider.
Quoted in post: Get a notification when you are [quoted] in a post by another Pinsider.
Received thumbs up: Get a notification when one of your forum posts gets thumbed up. Note: Pinside doesn't send out downvote notifications.
Market
New Marketplace Ad: The marketwatch watcher for hardcore collectors! Receive a notification as soon as a new machine for sale ad is added to the Marketplace. Select to be notified for all or just for wishlist ads. Select a radius and price limit.
New results in saved search: A daily summary of results in your stored marketplace searches. You can configure which searches are included.
Pinball Calendar
New pinball event: Get a notification when a new event is added to the pinball calendar. Select to receive only large events or also smaller local events.
Pinball Map
Location update: Get a notification when a Pinside Map location near you is added/updated. You can set a radius and choose to receive all updates or only new location notifications.
Shop Owner
New shop order: Get a notification about shop orders and order messages.
Daily Notifications Digest e-mail
One more thing! Did you know that... Some people find notifications distracting? Well, there's a solution for Pinsiders with notification overload!
If you don’t want to receive instant notifications all day long you can also have (some of) your notifications sent to your Daily Notifications Digest E-mail. This is a daily e-mail, tailor-made for you, containing notifications of the past 24 hours. This will allow you to keep up to date with things happening on Pinside, once a day, without being too distracting.
The cool thing is that you can configure per notification type what communications channel is used. For example, you can set things so that you'll receive an instant notification about someone mentioning/quoting you on the forum but leave all the PinsideMail notifications for your daily digest e-mail and maybe leave the thumbs up notifications to not be sent out at all and only show up in Notification Center on Pinside. And if you don’t care at all about location updates, you can simply disable that notification type and it won’t show up anywhere ever again.
No devices
In closing, notifications are a powerful new tool - if you use them wisely! In this day and age it's easy to get completely overloaded with notifications on your phone, so it's good to know that Pinside Notifications also work fine without setting up any push devices or even digest emails. If you like, you can stick with using Notification Center on Pinside to read your notifications. Leave all the 'push' and 'email' toggles unchecked and enjoy those notifications when it suites you.
But for those of you who want to get notified about that rare wishlist game hitting the marketplace... At least keep that Marketplace 'push' toggle enabled so you don't miss out! 
Troubleshooting / FAQ
There may be bugs! Okay, that's it. Go ahead and enable notifications now! Tell me what you think! And remember: there may be bugs, this is in BETA.Pinside says my device is not supported.
Notifications should work on Chrome, Firefox and Edge. They also work on Safari (desktop). They may work on other browsers. Are you on an iOS device? this is currently not supported, due to Apple not supporting the web standards needed for browser push. You can use Telegram as a workaround. I have also seen issues with the "Brave" browser, which I wasn't able to fix (which is a shame, as I like that browser). There may be other browsers that don't work.
What is Telegram Push?
Telegram is a messenger app, much like What's App. We have built a bot for it that allows Pinside to send notifications to any Telegram account. This makes notifications deliverable on essentially all platforms, even iOS. Simply install Telegram on your device via your favorite App Store and then hit the "Enable Telegram notifications" button on the notifications settings page (on that same device).
I'm on a supported browser, but enabling push for it doesn't seem to work.
Make sure you are not using an ad blocker on Pinside, they have been known to interfere with our push notifications workers. If you use an extension like Adblock, simply click the icon in your browser toolbar and disable it for Pinside.
I'm getting way too many 'new post' notifications for subscribed topics!
This is a matter of configuring the 'New Post' type notification, via the notifications settings page. Look up 'new post' notifications and hit the configure button to change how often you get notified about new posts.
Help! 'Thumbs Up' notifications are flooding my phone!
Kudos, you must be a popular Pinsider! I suggest disabling thumbs up notifications on the notifications settings page.
I'm not seeing a notification for thumbs down?
This is by design. We like notifications to keep you happy throughout the day!
Why isn't this feature free?
I like to keep all essential features of Pinside free for all to use and enjoy. The goal is to promote pinball. That said, notifications are not an essential feature and the infrastructure needed to support this feature isn't free (nor is the enormous amount of effort to built and support it all). So I hope you will consider the Pinside+ subscription to get access to this feature AND support Pinside!
