Live Notifications

Live Notifications

Invision Community only checks for notifications when a member opens the notification menu. Anything that happens while they are reading a page — a reply to their topic, a mention, a quote — sits there unseen until they navigate or reload.

Live Notifications shows it at the time. A small toast slides in at the corner of the page, the bell count updates to match, and the member carries on reading.

What it does

• Notifications appear as they happen. No reload, no navigation, no waiting for the member to go looking.
• The bell stays honest. The counter in the header is updated from the same figure, so the badge and the menu can never disagree.
• It reads like a notification, not an advert. A photo, one line of text, and a dismiss button. It fades after a few seconds, and hovering it stops the clock so nobody loses a message they were mid-way through reading.
• Click to go straight there. The toast is a link to whatever caused it.
• Optional chime. Off by default. When switched on it is a short two-note tone generated in the browser — nothing to download, and nothing to host.

Instant with Realtime, still useful without it

Installed alongside Realtime, notifications arrive over the existing WebSocket the moment they are sent — typically inside a few seconds, with no polling at all.

Without Realtime the application still works. It falls back to a light periodic check on an interval you set, so members see notifications while they read rather than only when they go looking. The AdminCP tells you plainly which of the two is happening, rather than leaving you to guess.

Built to stay out of the way

• Nothing is loaded for guests. A signed-out visitor gets no extra script at all.
• A background tab is never polled. Members with twelve tabs open do not generate twelve times the traffic.
• Members on a live connection are never polled at all.
• Reduced-motion preferences are honoured, and the toast is announced politely to screen readers rather than interrupting mid-sentence.
• Light and dark are both handled.

Private by construction

The live message that reaches a browser contains nothing — no title, no author, no link. It says only "look again". The notification itself is then fetched through Invision's own permission-checked endpoint, so a member can never be pushed something they are not allowed to read, even if a channel were somehow joined by the wrong person.

Each member listens on their own channel, and the permission to join it is cryptographically signed by your server for that one member. There is no shared feed to eavesdrop on.

Requirements

• Invision Community 5
• Optional: Realtime (with its gateway deployed) for instant delivery. Without it, the fallback check is used instead.

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