Remember when the Dev @[email protected] made a post months ago - https://lemmy.world/post/5716741, where they had just announced that feature for the comments-plugin? I was about to reply to that post, but I can’t find it on my home instance, so I decided to make a new post to address something about that feature.

How to enable

Since I’ve seen some people linking to this post on threads related to the feature, I’ve written some instructions on how to enable that feature:

1. Go to the settings button on any comments section like this:

2. Type notify to the prompt box:

3. And now, you can type any of these into the next prompt box:

• * to get notifications from every single comments section you’ve already visited once in the generator (we’ll mention these as “target sections” later)
• any trigger word or phrase to get notifications from comments mentioning the word/phrase in the generator, such as word, cat or dog
• multiple keyword rules separated with | such as cat|dog to get notifications whenever someone puts either cat or dog on the “target sections”, as mentioned in the next prompt box
• channel-specific triggers like *~>general or word~>general to get notifications only from the general channels, or *~>general|*~>feedback to get notifications on both general and feedback channels in one generator.

4. Hit OK or Enter as a last step, and you’re done! There’ll be another dialog stating that you’re now getting notified from all or specific channels, depending on what trigger input you’ve typed in the last prompt.

Caveats

Now, let’s talk about the caveats about the plugin, these are the first ones mentioned in the original post, re-written in a neatly organized list:

• No mobile support (for now)
• The notifications will not work if:
  • There’s not a single Perchance tab with the comments frame open on your browser
  • Tabs occasionally “sleeping” or “hibernating” on some browsers, so if it’s on the single tab which has the comments frame, it pauses the notifications script

However, there are some additional caveats that I want to point out:

• At least one comments frame from at least one tab has to be fully loaded in order to fully execute the notification script.
• If there’s really slow internet connection, or there are disruptions to the connection, the notifications won’t work.
• If the notifications remain untouched for a very long time or you left it while you turned off the computer, clicking them will just go to the Perchance welcome page instead of the generator where the notifications originated from.

But, here are some tips that might help:

• In some browsers, you can add perchance.org to the exclusion list to prevent “hibernating”, thus, you don’t have to open the tab constantly.
• For desktop users, you can pin the tab where your comments plugin is loaded, so when you open the browser, you just simply need to wait for that one comments plugin on that tab to fully load, and then the notifications will work.

All that stuff is based on my own experience - please let me know if there’s anything needed to add :)

Also, recently, some users have experienced problems where the auto update doesn’t work - specifically on https://perchance.org/ai-chat-modern, but I don’t know if that affected other generators as well. The temporary solution for now is simply reloading the comments frame or reloading the page entirely, that’ll also refresh the comments database inside the frame.