---
title: "Notifications"
description: "What gets you told, how often the extension checks, and why the list in the options page is the copy to trust."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://commentware.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Notifications

Somebody answering you on a page you are not looking at has to reach you
somehow, without your browser holding a connection open all day. So the
extension asks your server once a minute what has happened, and turns the
answer into a _notification_.

## What gets you told

Three things:

- **A mention.** Somebody picked you out of the `@` list in a comment.
- **A reply.** Somebody wrote in a thread you are already in.
- **A resolve.** Somebody marked a thread you are in as finished.

Somebody who is both in the thread and mentioned in the comment is told once, as
a mention. Two notifications for one sentence is noise, and the mention is the
more specific fact.

## How often

Your browser asks your server once a minute. That is a check rather than a
push — nothing is held open waiting for news, which is the same decision as
[shared rather than live](/docs/concepts/shared-not-live/).

**A minute's worth arrives as one notification.** One event is an ordinary
notification card; several become a list, showing the first five. Four separate
cards for four replies to one thread is how somebody turns a feature off.

## Why the list is the copy to trust

A notification card can be discarded by the machine it was handed to — macOS
with Chrome switched off in System Settings, a focus mode, Windows Focus
Assist — and Chrome reports success either way. There is no way for an
extension to know. So the extension's notification list is the copy that
cannot be silently dropped, and it is the one to check if things have gone
quiet.

If your browser has notifications switched off for Commentware, nothing is shown
and nothing is marked as delivered. Everything waits, and you get it when you
switch them back on. Nothing is lost by being denied.

## The counter on the icon

The extension's toolbar icon carries the number of **unresolved** threads on the
page you are looking at, capped at `99+`. Resolved threads are not counted: a
page with forty finished threads has nothing waiting on it.

The count is per tab, and it is only asked for on sites that your server already
holds comments for. That is deliberate — asking on every page would send every
URL you visit to a server. The cost is that a site which gained its first comment
somewhere else may go up to half an hour without a count on your machine.
Commenting on a new site fixes it immediately.

## Next steps

- [Read and silence notifications](/docs/using/notifications/): open the list,
  and turn the card and the sound off.