Notifications — User Guide

Notifications — User Guide

The Bell Icon

The bell icon in the top navigation bar shows how many unread notifications you have. Click it to open the quick dropdown, or click See all to visit the full notifications page.

What generates a notification?

• New messages — someone sends you a direct message
• Added to a space — you are added to a messaging space
• Added to a channel — you are added to a channel inside a space
• Blink shared — someone shares a Blink note with you
• Contact request — someone sends you a contact request
• System — platform announcements from the team

Notification Preferences

You can turn individual notification types on or off in your Account Hub → Notifications section. Toggle any switch and click Save preferences. Turning off a type means those notifications will not be created at all — they will not appear in your bell or notification list.

Managing Notifications

• Click a notification to mark it read and follow the link.
• Use Mark all read to clear the unread badge.
• Use Clear all to permanently delete all notifications.

Why a notification reaches one device and not another

A notification travels three ways at once, and they do not all need the same things. Knowing which is which explains almost every “it did not work”.

• The bell, at the top of the site. This always works. Every notification lands here and waits for you, however long you are away.
• The pop-up on screen. This one only appears if you have OrbitingFox open at that moment. If the tab is closed, there is nothing to pop up on — nothing is lost, it is in the bell.
• The alert on your phone. This is the one people mean when they say notifications are not working, and it needs your permission. Your browser asks once; if you said no, or never saw the question, no phone alert can ever arrive. No change on our side can grant it for you.

If your phone never buzzes

Open your notification settings on the site. If push is available and not yet switched on, there is an Enable button; if you previously blocked it, you will see a note saying so — and unblocking has to be done in the browser's own settings for this site, not here.

Each browser and device is separate. Granting permission on your laptop does nothing for your phone; you have to enable it on each one you want alerts on.

Since September 2026 the system also records which of the three ways worked, so if something really is broken we can now see it rather than guess. Before that, a phone that never asked for permission and a phone whose alerts were genuinely failing looked exactly the same from our side.