Old notifications now clear themselves away

A notification is a nudge. It tells you a response is ready, an approval is waiting, someone shared something with you — and you either act on it within a few minutes or you never do. Yet until now every notification the platform had ever raised was still there, filed away behind the newest ones, going back to the day you joined. On our own portal that had grown to more than four thousand of them.

Nobody scrolls to last August. But the bell still had to read all of it every time you opened it, which is a slow, pointless thing to make everybody pay for.

From now on, a notification older than 90 days is tidied away. The tidying happens quietly while you sign in, in the background — it never holds up your login and never keeps you waiting. It only ever touches your own notifications, so nobody is clearing away anybody else's, and platform notices are cleared away by the administrators who read them.

Ninety days is deliberately generous rather than clever. It is far longer than anyone keeps a nudge worth acting on, so nothing you would still want is at risk — and if you do want a full quarter of history, you still have it.

Nothing you can act on is lost. A notification is a pointer to something else — the thread, the approval, the document — and that something else is untouched and still exactly where it was. What goes away is the pointer, once it has been sitting unread and unopened for three months.

This also finishes a job we started last week. When notifications moved to being delivered to you rather than filed beside whatever they were about, the older ones were left where they lay, on the understanding that they would age out in time. This is what makes "in time" mean something: they now clear away on the same 90-day schedule as everything else.

An administrator who wants a different window — shorter, longer, or none at all — can set one for their whole installation.