4h ago
Lobby Chat: Basic Notifications
Lobby (chat) currently requires users to monitor windows manually.
Without notifications, users can miss replies, mentions, and announcements.
It is impractical for asynchronous communications once a community grows and is hard to get traction for the lobby without notifications.
Requested Features
1. System Notifications (Desktop Browser)
This would be nice to have
- Browser push banners when chat is not in focus.
- Trigger conditions:
- New message that @mentions the user.
- Reply in a thread the user started or participated in.
- Channel with “all messages” notifications enabled.
- Content: sender name, channel name, first 50–80 characters.
- Click action: opens chat at the exact message.
- Timeout: auto-dismiss after 5–7 seconds unless clicked.
2. Logged in Notifications (Navigation Bar)
I think this would be the MVP to make Lobby more usable
- Bell icon placed next to avatar in top-right nav.
- Badge bubble shows unread count.
- Dropdown list on click:
- Last 6 notifications with sender avatar, name, channel, snippet, timestamp.
- “View all” link for full history.
- “Mark all as read” option.
- Unread state: bold or highlighted until opened.
3. User Controls
- Per channel settings:
- All messages
- Mentions/replies only (default)
- Mute
- Global toggle for browser push notifications (on/off).
Benefits
- Real-time awareness without keeping chat tab in focus.
- Enables replies and improves networking.
- Better matches expectations from Slack/Teams/Discord.
Reviewing
Hey Andrew, thanks so much for sending this through. This is actually already in our list to work on :) The lobby is still technically in beta, and so there's a bunch of second-wave features we plan to add in the coming weeks and months. The lobby chat is part of the platform that the new streaming solution is being built around, and so we're all heads down on the streaming studio at present. Once that's out of the way (in the next four weeks, I'd imagine) we can jump on to the second round of feature improvements to the lobby chat. Hope that doesn't cause any issues for you in terms of timing, but that's how I probably see this particular feature update being handled.