Stay on top of localization with Pontoon notifications

With over 30 projects available for localization in Pontoon, hardly any day goes by without an important update in at least one project. Until recently, you had to manually check your team and project dashboards to find out if new strings have been made available for translation or if the deadline for your incomplete project approaches.

Enter notifications. Without a doubt, they are a critical component of a modern translation tool and no wonder they’ve been the top-voted feature in the Pontoon end-of-year 2016 survey. I’m excited to share some news on this topic.

Highlighted icon indicates unread notifications.

Notifications menu reveals more details.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve been rolling out Pontoon notifications, so there’s a good chance you’re already using them. If the bell icon in the page header is highlighted, it means you have unread notifications. By clicking on it, a popup will show up, revealing the details of all unread notifications.

When and where

Notifications are sent in the following scenarios:

• If new strings are added to a project.
• If an incomplete project is due in 7 or 2 days.
• If project managers manually send them.

Notifications are targeted, which means they are only sent to users that have made contributions to the project in the past.

Notifications page shows all notifications, grouped by project.

This is just the beginning

In the next few weeks we’ll be monitoring how often notifications are being sent out and read by users. We’ll use the acquired data to design the email notification system that will not only reach you outside Pontoon, but also stay away from polluting you inbox too much.

We’ll be also fine-tuning the list of scenarios on which we send notifications and extending it. For example, we’d like to notify team translators and managers when new suggestions are ready for a review.

Get involved

As always, we’d be very happy to hear your thoughts. Not only about the current implementation, but also about the next steps we should be taking with notifications.

And last but not least – if you have some coding skills, we’d be very happy to mentor you in fixing your first (or second, third…) Pontoon bug.