Setting up an unread post indicator

Introduction

The Notification Feed can be set up to be displayed when a website visitor clicks on a link, which triggers the feed to show. This is useful when users come to your website and may not be aware that there are new posts available to see in your notifications.

Here's what the unread indicator looks like:

Note: For information on setting up your Notification Feed, please refer to our guide, Setting up your Notification Feed.

Setting up your indicator

To set up your indicator, you will need to enable it in the settings for the specific Notification Feed.

Once there, click on the toggle switch to enable the unread indicator:

Once you enable it, additional options will be displayed where you can customize the indicator's colours and absolute position. 

The absolute position is in relation to your trigger link that you defined when setting up your Notification Feed. Typically, you only need to set a top or bottom, and a right or left. So for example, if you set the top and left positions, you should set the right and bottom positions with a value of "unset" so that these values do not override the top and left values.

How the unread indicator works

Note -- you do not need to understand how the indicator works. This section is added here so technically minded users will understand this functionality's limitation.

Whenever the Notification Feed widget retrieves the list of posts, it checks whether the user has seen the latest post and checks for this information against the browser's local storage. This information is not sync'ed back to the server in order to simplify both the client and server side code.

If the user's browser is found to have not seen the latest post, then the unread indicator is displayed.

Because of this, the same user, using two different browsers or different devices will see the unread indicator active.