It seems that I don’t receive any notifications on my sentence comments made from the game screen, unlike topics created directly in the forums. That means I don’t see any feedback until the next time the sentence comes up for review, but only if I happen to open the comments.
I think this can be the reason why it often takes very long to get feedback on the answers to sentence comments, which has often puzzled me.
I think the behavior depends on whether people respond directly to a post or reply to the thread; only in the former case will one get notifications, unless one manually changes the watch level. If this assumption is true, I think it would be a good idea to set the default level to “Watching” for anybody who posts to a thread.
The workaround is this: after you have posted a sentence comment, use the link to view the discussion in the forums, and change the watch level from “Normal” to “Watching”.
That this has to be done manually is probably just an oversight, but it is a shame anyway.
I think i’ve mentioned this to you before - I’ve never had ANY notifications at all. Would like to received them, instead of having to check back every day or so.
Not even when people directly reply to you? Are you using a mobile browser or desktop? Are you referring to “live” browser notifications, or the little blue icon that appears on your avatar?
It might be worth confirming your general notification settings here.
However, when looking for where to change the notification settings for @galning , I found something I’ve been wanting all along and I wonder if you might be happy with too @morbrorper, since it seems to have been partially suggested in this bug report, which hopefully applies to (initiated) sentence discussions too, namely the option to always “Watch” by default after commenting on (or creating?) a topic, rather than just “Track” it:
That setting did indeed look promising, but when I finally found it in my settings, it turned out I had it already set like that. So it doesn’t seem to apply when posting from the play screen, only in the forums. But it was a good find anyway.
Ya see - I didn’t know you had replied to me as i get NO notifications. 
Perhaps you should have sent me a pigeon??
Yes, have confirmed my settings (more than once). Desktop - Win 10 / fully patched. No clue as to what you mean by blue icon…basically it would be nice to get an email to tell me that a discussion has updated…and they don’t work for me. Never have.
Odd… And if I tag you like this, @galning? Still nothing?
I meant I always receive notifications for replies, tags, and new threads in sections I’m “watching”, as a little blue counter badge on my forum profile icon as follows:
It seems there is a possibility to receive emails for any notifications like replies, by enabling “always” here:
Hello. I’ve worked in IT for 32 years and have never seen a crappier user interface than this (from a navigation perspective). How is it that this “preferences” option is only available through the Discussions page? I’d previously been in my Profile and wondered how on earth i changed things. This is SO well buried. Very odd place to put it and not user friendly - should be linked to your Profile page too.
Moan over. No, i didn’t get an email from your tag. Have now realised what you mean about the blue dot - but I tend to only come in here once or twice a day and so an email would prompt me more quickly.
Have now been in and set those settings to “always” - will see how this goes now.
Thanks for you help!
T
@galning. Hey, be a little kinder to our happy (non crappy) Clozemaster 'cos here you get lots of help and replies from these guys and even from “Mike”! If you asked a question in “the other place” you’d probably wait a week if you got a response at all. I’ve learnt everything about Cloze from reading this friendly forum and asking questions.
Have a happy ClozeM day:-)
(said with a smile!)
Hi, i do like it - but that is an awful user interface. Why is it buried so deeply? Unless it had been mentioned i would never have found it. That was frustration coming out…
@galning Totally understand. I was often in the dark then bingo, it all fell into place.
My latest eureka moments happen with the “Listening to authentic voices” section. To get more than two right first time round is joy indeed.
Be well;-)
The software platform that we are using for these discussions is called Discourse.
GitHub - discourse/discourse: A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.
Discourse - Civilized Discussion
It is one of the most widely used (if not the most widely used) discussion platforms on the internet in 2021.
I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to call this a crappy/awful user interface is stretching credibility to the extreme - just look at the wide range of organisations that have adopted this “awful user interface” for their discussion forums.
For example, Discourse is used for the discussion of at least one other popular language learning platform that I can think of - Memrise.
Memrise Community
Now, maybe it hasn’t been made clear that Clozemaster (the language learning platform) and the community forum (powered by Discourse) are separate entities that need to be managed separately (e.g. through settings menus). If that is the source of frustration and the reason that these settings were considered “buried so deeply”, then that is a different issue and one that I believe could be addressed by the site administrators.
From what I can see, the problems that have led to some frustration (perhaps mild, perhaps errrm … somewhat aggressive), are due to the fact that Clozemaster has delivered an excellent opportunity for people to discuss sentences on the community forum, and furthermore it has also provided a link to these discussions on its own platform.
Typically, using a discussion forum in this manner would have required the user to go to the discussion forum, start a new conversation, put in the subject line (which the user might or might not decide to be the same as the sentence itself) and then write their notes regarding the sentence.
However, Clozemaster has gone one step further and actually allowed a limited interface between the discussion forum and the “Discussion” tab for the sentence in Clozemaster itself, such that discussions can be started, continued, and updates to discussions included in the “Discussion” tab. For my part, I am incredibly grateful for the inclusion of this feature.
This means that after having filled in the cloze on a sentence, in some cases I can start a discussion (which might even be just a note that other people might be interested in such as incorrect pronunciation). Alternatively, having entered the cloze, I might see a little number next to the “Discussion” tab for that sentence and then be able to follow an interesting discussion that other people have posted. These are an excellent features, and ones that I use often.
@morbrorper makes a good point, in my opinion, about having watch levels changed if you post a comment in Clozemaster itself. I would hope that it might be possible to implement the Watching/Tracking level change as suggested. (N.B. I appreciate that Clozemaster has done a very good job of hiding some of the complexity of matching identities (and access/authorisation) in Clozemaster and identities in the community forum, when in practice this might require quite a bit of work).
Furthermore, a suggestion that I believe would be very worthy of consideration would be for the site administrator (@mike ?) to add a sentence with a link to the instructions for how to use Discourse somewhere in that “Guten Tag …” message at the top of the community forum page (modifying it to suit Clozemaster branding if desired, as suggested under “Tips” at the bottom of the instructions page).
Discourse New User Guide - howto / faq - Discourse Meta
It might also be useful to send a message with the instructions to new users of the community forum when they sign up.
This might then lead to people being less likely to think that the interface is crappy/awful, and that instead they might perhaps have some mild degree of appreciation that it could possibly (if pressured under extreme duress) be considered at least … “acceptable” 
.
Actually I did receive something of the sorts, with also a helpful tutorial for how to do certain things. I don’t recall if there was specific mention of the notification settings and such, it might be worth including that indeed.
To be honest (in addition to all the rightful praise already mentioned by you and @Floria7 (as well as that I’m a bit of a nerd and really appreciative of the clean interface of these and other Discourse forums)), I find it quite refreshing that the default setting for the Clozemaster forums does not seem to be to spam you about everything. Generally the first thing I have to do when having signed up for something is go to the notification settings and switch everything off, to prevent drowning in spam emails.
Hello. Look. I don’t want to fight about this but if someone has to ASK where something is - then a UI has failed. I can’t see how you can argue with that. What is the problem with someone adding another link under the Profile page? It told me on there that i could update my profile - but didn’t tell me where to go to do it and I’ve only found out through this thread - 53 days after joining. THAT is a design failure.
However. I didn’t mean to infer that the interface as a whole was crappy (although i can see how you might have thought that - I was just referring the the thing that we were discussing in this thread - that buried link). To be fair - I wasn’t in the best of moods when i typed it as my Indefinite Articles have vanished and the link is broken. Probably could have worded it more clearly - so I’ll apologise for that. Clearly this has touched a nerve.
But. As a user I shouldn’t have to have an understanding of how the service that I’ve paid for is being provided. I’m a nerd but not really that interested in what is under the hood of things that I’m utilising - I just want them to function.
And, yes, it’s great that the sentences link to the discussion. But, to be fair, Duolingo does it MUCH better (not sure if you’ve ever been on it). However, I think the 2 services provide different features and have actually recommended Clozemaster to a fair few people on there - through their discussion forum (so it’s there for all to see).
I’ve said that Duolingo is great for getting started and the repetition drums Adverbs and Adjectives and such like into you. But you eventually get to a stage where you need to widen your vocab and that is where Clozemaster comes in. I certainly couldn’t have gotten anywhere on here without first spending several months on Duolingo - and now use both daily.
One other thing that I have said to people is that, on here, there are not many people discussing the Swedish phrases and it could do with some more contributors to get some debate going on certain sentences. Duolingo can often have dozens and dozens of contributors to each sentence and I miss that on here.
I must have SOME degree of appreciation for it - because I’ve paid for Pro. But I’m afraid that I cannot say that it’s acceptable for the settings for my profile (including some things that I don’t think are related to discussions - such as Bio and picture) to be buried under the Discussion link. It’s just not logical. And I did go back to all my Welcome emails and read through them and could find nothing in there.
But I’m still confused as to these notifications - is there no feature that actually sends emails?? I only normally come into the discussion area every couple of days and had been under the impression that notification emails were available - but have never had one.
Does that explain things better? Are we all ok now? 
Regards from a too hot UK…Tracey
I couldn’t find any mention in it - I’d copied all the notification emails into Word. The ones i received covered buttons, listening skills, privacy policy, scoring and T&Cs
The one relating to streaks and friends says you can update your profile - but the link sends you to Learn language in context - Clozemaster - which doesn’t actually have a link on to change your profile.
I’m not intending to get into any off-topic discussion, or even any kind of discussion 
but just wanted to say that personally one of my huge frustrations with DuoLingo discussions has been that you don’t even have any kind of option to get notified of replies to your posts there. I have had to leave discussions open in their individual tabs and refresh them from day to day to see if someone replied. You can “follow discussions”, but that doesn’t seem to do anything. So I for one am super grateful for the notification counter here. And indeed the overall way the forums and all are structured.
The main difference there (apart from DuoLingo obviously already having many more users to start with), is that the discussions here are visible by free users, but they can’t post, whereas on DuoLingo anyone can contribute to the discussions. There was a discussion here somewhere about that. Opening posting on discussions to free users definitely could benefit a lot of sentence discussions, especially for less popular language pairings, but, as you can also see on the “other” discussion forums, comes at the price of a lot of spam as well, which would require bringing on board many moderators to deal with this kind of unwanted activity.
I just had a quick look too, and couldn’t easily find something, which is why I mentioned above that I think it would indeed be useful if the first message by the discobot perhaps included something like “If you want to change your notification preferences, you can do so here [link]”.
After changing the setting, are you still not receiving email notifications for comments/replies/… here?
It might also depend on what you have set under the setting as when it considers you as being “away” (after 10 minutes, …).
Always ok
Stay cool, and enjoy the rest of your weekend 
Absolutely, in fact we’re more than ok, much more - it appears that the two of us have a deep, deep connection.
What’s that connection, you ask? Tell me more, I neeeeeed to know!!!
Well, I just noticed that we have both earned the “Thank you” and “Appreciated” badges, at exactly the same time !!
Thank You - Clozemaster
Appreciated - Clozemaster
How much of a special connection is that!
However, someone else might have set in train a dastardly plot to undermine you.
In all good faith you mentioned a comparison with, ahem, how should I say this, … “another language learning service”.
Unfortunately, just at this moment, it appears that all is not well with linking sentences with their related discussions over at “the other place”, as a number of annoyed people are currently mentioning on their forum
discuss button rarely works now - Duolingo
See, they betrayed you!!
We’re your new friends now .
Morning!
Hmmm - find this odd as I get emails from ALL the DL discussions that I follow and always have. And there is an option to “unfollow” if you decide that you’ve had enough. I have moaned in the past about “deep” discussion threads, where you sometimes don’t get a REPLY button showing and have to reply to someone further up the chain - but that’s on heavily populated threads. I like the indentation though as it’s easier to see who is replying to what. I find the flat replies on here a bit confusing, especially when they get lengthy.
The only thing that’s annoying me about DL at the moment is that there’s a bug with the count in that you earn points for your lesson but it doesn’t add to your total. Minor thing though as you can bash Return and it updates.
I really would like email updates from Clozemaster, to prompt me to look. But have now kind of got used to looking for the blue dot. Which is actually another thing - the Help info for newbies is fairly lacking as I’d no idea about the blue dot.
And I’ve zero clue as to what these badges mean - I’ve never really bought into gamification much. I’m trying to learn a language and am doing it at my own pace.
I have a business home boarding dogs and, having had no bookings since we got locked down, I’m now busy again and booked right into 2022. As I’m busy at the moment I’m just treading water with my learning by doing an hour or so across a day (both these applications). There are lots of new lessons on DL that I’ve not opened yet and don’t intend to until the autumn, when i have more time to understand properly. Consequently after months in Diamond league I’m slipping down - but who cares? I don’t want to compete with anyone else - been there, done that. I’m here to learn.
Anyway. Enough waffle, nice to meet you! 
T
Morning!
Re notifications - see my answer below to zzcguns - discussions / notifications work fine for me on DL (I’m not a paid subscriber on there - but pay for Clozemaster).
I really like the lively discussions on DL as native Swedes have contributed information on sentences that go way deeper than just looking up in dictionaries and so on could ever do. I often learn more from the discussions than from the lessons.
Yes, it gets annoying when “kids” start talking about animé or something. But, to be fair, they often get jumped on by other users before the mods have to get involved.
My personal view is that opening up discussions (to none subscribers) would increase the volume of debate, enrich the experience and, ultimately, drive more business. At the moment you get the impression that there are about 3 people using Clozemaster (Swedish). And morbrorper feels like my own personal tutor some days!!! I want a deep understanding of grammar - not just the ability to parrot a few phrases. So i ask a lot of questions and query some of the stuff from Tatoeba (probably driving him nuts).
Nope - apart from my first week, have received no emails from Clozemaster. Because the reports time how long it thinks you have been learning i close the browser down when I’m not looking at it, so it never gets a chance to think that I’m away.
While we’re discussing the help text - is there anywhere that explains how the “edit” sentence functions and so on work? I love that i can stop some phrases appearing again but all the edit functions - are notes added there just visible to me or everyone??
Thanks for responding…a smidge cooler today. But it’s early doors.
T
