An update reminder is told once, not every hour

When a plugin you have installed publishes a new build, your installation tells you so with an Update available notification on the bell, and leaves the decision to you. That is the intended behaviour: nothing installs itself unless you asked it to.

What was not intended is that it told you again on every check. Your installation re-examines what the plugin catalogue is serving whenever it starts, whenever it reads a catalogue, and whenever a plugin repository publishes — and each of those checks added a new notification, because the reminder had no memory of having been given. A package you had simply not got round to updating produced several identical rows a day, for as long as you left it. On our own portal, 124 of the newest 200 notifications were this one message about two packages.

The effect was worse than clutter. Those rows are what the bell has to read every time you open it, so a reminder you had already seen made the bell slower for everyone who could see it — and a notification you had dismissed came straight back.

A reminder is now a statement about a version, not an event. The first time a new build of a package is available, you get one notification. Every later check that still sees the same build says nothing at all: no new row, no re-lit bell, and nothing fetched. If you dismiss it, it stays dismissed.

When the plugin publishes a genuinely newer build, that is a different thing to be told about, and you get a fresh reminder for it — which is the whole point of the message.