Comment by fphilipe

My biggest gripe with GitHub has been the notification system. Personally I can't use the web UI for notifications because they bundle multiple notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed notifications since it is up to me to scan the issue/PR for new comments.

My workaround has been to use email notifications exclusively. I have a Gmail filter that applies a label to all notifications and skips the inbox. Then in my mail client I have a smart mailbox that only shows me unread notifications with that label (or that folder, from an IMAP perspective). The smart mailbox then shows me a counter of unread notifications. This way I don't oversee comments when multiple ones are made in a PR.

Problem 1: No context in these notifications. It would be nice if these emails could show the code in question for diff comments or the entire comments thread.

Problem 2: Now what is really bad with these notification emails is that the link "view it on GitHub" sometimes no longer links to the comment I'm being notified of. This happens when the comment was made on a PR on a line of the diff that no longer exists, as sometimes is the case when new commits are pushed. I then have to go to the main PR page, expand all collapsed "foo commented on an outdated diff" comments and manually search for the comment in order to get the context and be able to reply.

By fixing problem 1, problem 2 would be automatically fixed with it and make my workflow much more productive. Is there anyone else annoyed by this?