Hey all!

Pinside notifications are a pretty valuable feature on Pinside, that helps you stay informed about various activities and updates on the site. our real-time notification system ensures that you can quickly respond to ads, engage in discussions, and stay connected with the latest happenings on the platform.

I wanted to take a moment and explain some changes to our notifications system, so if you are a Pinside+ member and using notifications (or if you're just interested), please keep reading

Make sure push notifications are enabled for you!

Please note that notifications are a Pinside+ feature. Subscribe to Pinside+ to enjoy Pinside notifications while supporting your favorite pinball website!

Pinside Notifications

Let's start with a quick overview of the events on Pinside that trigger a notification to be sent to you:

- When you are @mentioned in a post
- When someone [Quotes] your post
- When one of your posts receives thumbs
- When you receive a PM Message
- When you get a new Follower
- When someone you follow starts a New Topic (NEW!)
- When a New Post is made in a topic that you subscribe to
- When a New Marketplace Ad is spotted (matching your set parameters).
- When one of your Favorited ads gets updated (i.e. a price reduction)
- When there are new results in a Marketplace saved search
- When you need to refresh batteries on a game
- when you receive a New order in your Pinside Shop
- When a new Pinball Event (matching your set parameters)
- When a Location near you gets added/updated
- When you Unlock a Pinside Achievement

Setting up
Some of these are simply an on/off switch, others can be tweaked in more detail, via notification settings.

Tweak when to receive particular notifications

Now, by default, all these notifications get send to your notifications inbox. The little bell icon in the top right of the screen (next to the PM envelope icon) indicates you have new notifications.

View and filter your notification straight on the site

That notifications inbox is a handy screen, indeed, but this is not the point of notifications, right? You want to get notified, even when not actively browsing the site. This allow for direct action: i.e. respond to a post, be the first to react to a new marketplace ad, know someone replied to your topic etc.

That's where push notifications come in!

My phone showing some push notifications.

Push notifications
When you add a device to receive push notifications, it will receive real-time alerts about notifications happening.

Here I'm set up to receive notifications on two devices. On my browser and on my iPhone.

2024 changes

Okay, time to mention some important changes for those who were already using push notifications. I have changed the way push notifications get delivered by implementing web standards, instead of relying on third-parties. This results in lower dependencies and faster delivery.

The downside: this means you're going to have to re-add your device following the steps below.

Desktop browser
Web push notifications are natively supported by all major modern browsers!

- On the browser that should receive the notifications, visit https://pinside.com/pinball/my-pinside/settings/notifications#subscribed-devices
- Hit the blue 'Enable push in this browser' button
- Done!

Android phone
Web push notifications are natively supported on Android!

- On your Android phone, visit https://pinside.com/pinball/my-pinside/settings/notifications#subscribed-devices
- Hit the blue 'Enable push in this browser' button
- Done!

Apple iPhone (or iPad)
Since iOS 16, push notifications also work for Pinsiders with an iPhone. There's a bit of a setup:

Setting up a home screen shortcut app for Pinside, so you can receive push notifications.

- Visit Pinside homepage in the safari browser on your iOS 17+ iPhone.
- In the toolbar, tap on the 'Share' button (arrow up).
- Choose 'Add to Home Screen'.
- Optionally edit the name of the home screen app, then tap 'Add' in the top right corner of the popup.
- Pinside will now appear on your Home Screen as a native app. Launch it.
- Inside the Pinside 'app', navigate to Settings > Push Configuration and tap the "enable push in this browser" button.
- Done!

Testing 1..2

Send test notification (resized).png

That's it!

I looked at the most recent notifications sent to your iPhone and they are confirmed delivered by Apple's push server. Are you sure you they are not appearing but muted by 'focus' mode or whatnot?

And what happens if you open the homescreen 'app'? Does that trigger a display of notifications?

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The notifications feature on iOS was tested on a number of iOS devices at Pinside HQ and working properly on all.

Could you try deleting the Pinside 'app' from your home screen:

Deleting the home screen 'app', or 'bookmark' as Apple calls it.

Then re-add it:

Adding Pinside as an 'app' to your iPhone home screen.

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As a last effort, you could try to clear website data for Pinside from your iOS cache. To do so, first delete Pinside home screen 'app' from your home screen (I think Apple calls them 'bookmarks'). Then go to iPhone settings > safari > advanced > website data --- Now look for pinside.com and slide it left to reveal a delete button. This will clear Pinside website data (cache). After all that, navigate to Pinside in safari, and ad it as a home screen 'app' once more as per instructions in my post #1 above.

From your screenshot, it looks like you are not in the Pinside home screen 'bookmark/app'. As described in my post under "2024 changes > Apple iPhone", you have to create a bookmark for Pinside on your home screen. Start that and then subscribe to push notifications from within this app.

Telegram worked pretty well, up until the beginning of this year when it started acting up and eventually it didn't work at all. Probably some changes to their API, but I had no time to dive into this. And then, when Apple FINALLY added support for web push to iOS, I decided to drop support for Telegram altogether. If a lot of Pinsiders want it, I can always plan to spend time on it, but right now this is not a priority.

I'm adding some more debugging to notifications backend to hopefully find out why this is happening. Stay tuned.

Thanks for the tip!

I do believe this was only necessary for older versions of iOS? Not the latest version 17?

Your device shows up as delivering properly. Maybe you already figured that out since your post, but as far as I can see notifications are successfully being delivered to your Apple device.

Great suggestion! I have added badging. It will currently show the number of notifications received since you last checked the notifications page on Pinside.

Yeah, I already got some requests

I hope to find some time to dive in to this, somewhere next week.

Yes. You may have to refresh the Pinside home screen 'app' for this to work.

I did this by tapping the icon, then I hit the refresh button in the black bar at the bottom of the app.

Here is how I'm seeing it on my iPhone:

19 notifications since I last checked my notifications screen

I see the last successful notification sent to you (a test notification) was 4 hours after your post.

If it's still not working, maybe your could try to remove the home screen app/bookmark, then re-add it?

I see the last successful notification sent to you was 2 hours after your post. I see it was accepted by Apple's push server, but what happens after, I cannot know.

To all those for whom push notifications first works for a few hours/days and then stops delivering: are you opening any of the notifications you receive? Maybe delivery is being halted by Apple once too many notifications are gone left unopened, i.e. 'ignored'?

These are grouped notifications. I.e. multiple messages in the same PM thread.

You can open the group and see them all via the “show all” link.

Hope that answers your question!

The red badge number indicates the number of notifications sent to you since you last opened the notifications screen on Pinside.

This number gets sent along with each notification that Pinside pushed to your device.

When you visit the Notifications Inbox (https://pinside.com/pinball/connect/notifications), the next notification will have a value of 1 sent along with it.

Opening the notification does not (yet) reset the badge. I'm not sure if this can be done technically, but I'll make a note to look into this.