New notifications level? ("Focus")

I am using an on-premise, free plan, not sure if this is relevant to my problem, solved by a higher plan.

I have been experimenting with two levels of Notifications for code review discussions: Mention and Participate. The first one is very silent (which is kind of good), but requires that the conversation parties invoke my name in merge request discussion. If they forget to do so, I will miss out on some messages. The latter, OTOH, floods my inbox with notification emails which are often irrelevant for me, which leads to my ignoring emails, which is a bad thing.

Why some discussions might be irrelevant for me, you might ask. Because in a big monorepo where different disciplines (frontend, backend, devops/configuration) meet, a dev might not be participating in all conversations, but still want to be focused in other ones.

That’s why I was wondering if it’s possible (maybe already on roadmap) to introduce a more involved notification logic, which I would call a Focus level

In plain words the logic for merge requests would be as follows:

notify me of all messages in MRs
where I am MR author
or
from threads I have participated in before.

That way, if a user simply forgets to invoke my name, I will still be notified, my email inbox will only receive focused notifications which I will never ignore.

I realize that my view might be simplistic, the example doesn’t take into account roles available in higher plans, but I just wanted to see if I’m all alone in this problem and maybe there is more interest in that level of Notifications.

Ideally, I would see notifications more configurable anyway, like the email filters available in webmail but that’s for another post maybe.

Greetz,
CoA

You are definitely not alone in wanting improvements to notifications. There’s even a post that was made back in 2017 about the notification levels being unclear that seems to have never been addressed (the descriptions on the notification levels are still very misleading, at least as of Sept 2023’s release).

“Participation” level is obnoxiously verbose (even though its description reads “only receive notifications for threads you have participated in”), and “On mention” level oddly excludes when someone directly replies to you.

I simply want a notification level that is similar to “On mention” but will also notify you when a comment thread you participated in or started has activity. You know, what Participation level should actually do. I’m not interested in being notified about every little twitch that occurs on a merge request.