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I was contemplating adding notifications to my app, Droidstack. I would've liked to be able to add notifications for when new answers are posted to a user's (favorite) questions, when new comments are posted in reply to them or when they're questions / answers are edited by someone else.

Unfortunately, the only ways I could do that are:

  • Download all the questions and answers of a user every 15 minutes. These might be in the hundreds, so not a good idea.
  • Download only the last 10 items, sorted by activity, and see if they change. If any changes appear, use /questions/{id}/timeline to figure out what changed. Not a good idea because that means a separate request for every changed item, plus there's no /answers/{id}/timeline (so if an answer changes I can't know what changed -- upvote/downvote, comment, ...).

That's why I propose /users/{id}/notifications (or name it any way you want, like updates), that would gather all this info under a single API call. This would be very similar to the /timeline calls.

Also, none of the data that would be provided by such a call is private. This means that this doesn't have to wait for 2.0. Maybe 1.1? :)

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2 Answers 2

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You can synthesize most/all of this call currently (new answers, changes in user rep, and comments directed at user are all accessible in v1.0) however it does take multiple calls.

We'll revisit this for subsequent API versions.

As TheLQ pointed out, this was added in v2.1.

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  • Shouldn't this be marked [status-completed] since 2.1 supports this?
    – TheLQ
    Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 12:16
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I think this was already answered here: Can we have some sort of notification system?

I would like to see this as well but it seems that it isn't going to happen.

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    I read that question and it's completely different than mine. I'm not asking for a service that would poll my app whenever something happens. Rather, I'm asking for an API call that I could poll every now and then.
    – Felix
    Commented Jul 15, 2010 at 0:58

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