Let us delete in-app notifications/messages

[rubyrune]

This is clogging up my iphone. I have a year or more worth of useless Fitbit notification messages I'd like to shed. I saw a 'solved' notice in here from a year ago stating it was resolved by stating there is no solution. This is simply ignoring the myriads of request/votes of customer requests/concerns to fix it. Fitbit should have had a REAL solution by now and apparently do not. In reality this problem has not been resolved but simply is being ignored by the company/moderator. The solution 'solved' to put a vote in ideas does not address the real concern or issue at hand. What's the point of a community forum if Fitbit does not listen to its customers? The thread should have flagged Fitbit/moderator to produce a real fix, we're still waiting.

[Sugar1924]

I agree with everything you wrote, this should not be hard to do, after all these notifications auto deleted until 2/17!! You can stop these from coming to your phone though.

Sent from my iPhone

[Sugar1924]

The link is let us delete in-app notifications. When you get one of these emails, click on the header (let us...) and it should take you there.
..
Sent from my iPhone

[ptk999]

Yippee

Sent from my iPhone

[jtarn]

Why does the number of votes go DOWN when I click the link???

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@LZeeW wrote:

There are several threads with users complaining about the in-app notifications and I am one of them.  To me, they are absolutely useless.  We want to be able to delete them (with or without reading them).  I know each message is small, but it is still data clogging up my phone. 

Now if the notifications and messages are kept on the server and are not on my phone, that only makes it a little better.  I am not the only one who wants to make these go away.  They are either clogging up my phone or clogging up your servers.

Moderator edit: Title for Clarity

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[Sugar1924]

????

Sent from my iPhone

[Sugar1924]

So why does it go down? Is the count therefore inaccurate? Fro the responses I've been getting there should be at least 3x as many votes to be able to delete notifications/ messages. And I read the posting and I did not see any reason for modification. Unless of course you remove the expletives. Just let us delete these, this is getting quite tiresome.

Sent from my iPhone

[azwxguy]

I am voting with everyone else. I want to be able to manually delete notifications. I don't even get notifications now that there are 100 held in there, it seems.

[Sugar1924]

I think they should automatically delete as soon as they are read! This was true before the update 2/17. I also believe we should be able to delete all data accrued. Do you realize all the daily data on the app is still on your app from the day it was installed? That is using up more memory than notifications that can not be deleted!

Sent from my iPad

[OliB977]

I have notifications dating over a year ago. There does not even seem to
be a purge interval. It’s pointless, distracting, and diminishes the user
experience. I’m just waiting for my Alta to bite the dust then I’ll find
another monitor from another manufacturer. Clearly the company does not
care that this is a major issue for a lot of customers.

[Sugar1924]

OliB977,
I agree 100%, I’m waiting too, for my charge 2 to stop working. My wife’s Alta lasted 1 1/2 years and then she bought an Apple Watch and does not have this problem. I will do the same.
And for our moderator, Liz. I have a question, how many consumers have said that due to this abominable service they will not purchase another Fitbit ?

Sent from my iPad

[StatDude]

I think that the number of posts on this thread should be added to the votes already cast. It seems to me that public outrage rather than mere votes should count. But then again, my favorite story I heard about still is the one where someone contacted the Fitbit help desk and the help desk person asked the user if they had checked the forum for the answer to their question...

[BABelling]

When I last posted to this forum, about a week or so ago, the vote count was 486. I see that as of this writing the vote count is down by two, to 484. If someone is relying on votes instead of reading comments to determine whether this is still a key concern, they would assume the needle hasn’t moved on this.

Why is the vote down by two? I experimented the last time I was on the forum and if I attempted tp vote again, the counter simply removed my initial vote so I was back to essentially no vote. Apparently it allows only one vote per user. Otherwise, I can’t believe that there have been NO votes in the flurry of commentary in the last ten days.

I’m not exactly sure how to make more noise on this apart from the decision to exit the FitBit family when the current devices fail. This is unfortunate.

Beverly Bellinger
babelling@aol.com

[StatDude]

Perhaps the strategy is to let the votes dwindle to zero...which would make this hot mess topic a non-issue. Maybe we should take a separate vote?

[BABelling]

(I apologize if this appears to be a duplicate post of a few minutes ago, but I don't think my last response hit the general communications chain.)

When I last posted to this forum, about a week or so ago, the vote count was 486. I see that as of this writing the vote count is down by two, to 484. If someone is relying on votes instead of reading comments to determine whether this is still a key concern, they would assume the needle hasn’t moved on this. 

Why is the vote down by two? I experimented that last time I was on the forum and if I attempted tp vote again, the counter simply removed my initial vote so I was back to essentially no vote. Apparently it allows only one vote per user. Otherwise, I can’t believe that there have been NO additional votes in the flurry of commentary in the last ten days. 

I’m not exactly sure how to make more noise on this apart from the decision to exit the FitBit family when the current devices fail. This is unfortunate.

[Sugar1924]

StatDude,
...And. I think this is typical...when I first contacted Fitbit customer service I was told to check the Fitbit community and that’s how Fitbit rectifies problems, complaints etc. Does not seem to work at all. I personally have been on this thread since April 2017 and many people have been told to contact the community. Well we see how that’s worked.

Sent from my iPad

[Sugar1924]

Beverly,
I noticed this back in April, 2017 when there were about 270 thumbs up. With all the outraged customer’s complaints I’ve received since then, it seems there has to be at least 5x as many as the counter shows. But Fitbit has figured that out yet?...or have they rigged the game?

Sent from my iPad

[Sugar1924]

How about just change the wording and therefore start a new post, and check to see if Fitbit rigs that one too. As an aside, when we had the time change and everyone’s Fitbit went bonkers, I voted and the same seem occurred. Except that was fixed within 24 hrs., but for those of you who bought your Fitbit after 4/18, just wait until 11/18 when it happens again.

Sent from my iPad

[Sugar1924]

It is a duplicate, but not a problem. Sometimes I get the response that my post did not get sent and every once in while I check the forum and some of the posts I’ve received or sent are not there.
Just for fun, if you’re bored, check other posts and vote and check back a few weeks later and see if the vote went up or down. I’ve done so and seen the tally go down.

Sent from my iPad

[SunsetRunner]

I understand the rage around voting functionality, but that's simply the way Lithium works (it powers this Community Forum) 😞

It's based on Kudos feature which allows you to add or remove your kudos (vote) and can be configured to restrict how many kudos a user can give within configured time interval.

If you click on the vote number you can see all the users who gave their vote and check if you're in the list.

If you click on the thumbs up icon you can add or remove your vote, but current configuration prohibits voting more than once.

It's funny that there's a link with recently implemented suggestions ordered by "Hot":

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/idb-p/features

Apparently, "Clock Faces Gallery UI Improvements" is the 2nd hottest suggestion as of now with 1 comment and 7 total votes!

However, this topic that was started on 04/15/2017 with 484 votes and 868 comments out of which 775 are new (obviously very hot) appears on the 7th page!

Feels like something is rigged in the way Fitbit considers discussions as hot, or web admin needs to be trained on how to configure Lithium 🙂

[SunsetRunner]

For those who suggested that messages and notifications should be unconditionally auto-deleted after certain time period or as soon as they are read: this would be a lousy user experience and we can argue if it would be even worse than not to delete them at all.

Imagine if you couldn't control your email's inbox and either all emails you ever received are sitting there or someone starts deleting them as they find fit. You would probably instantly stop using that email and switch to alternative that offers you full control over your mailbox and preferably some additional bells and whistles.

The way I see these messages and notifications should not differ in any way from emails.
If user received them it was with user's intention - you either got them from your friends or because you configured to receive certain type of notifications. Either way, user as a recipient, should have full control to delete the ones that are not needed (read or unread) and keep the ones user decides have certain importance. But it's up to the user to decide when and what should be deleted, and why part is irrelevant in this case. And deleting means hard delete from the server, not a dummy soft delete where everything stays on the server, but is simply tagged to be hidden.
As these messages and notifications can accumulate fast, it is highly desired to have an option to delete all of them with a confirmation step, just in case a user accidentally hit the wrong button. This is what would be considered as a minimum usable user experience. Anything less is simply unacceptable in 21st century and UX experts should be all familiar with this concept.

This should have been there since day 1 when messages and notifications were introduced.
Then you can build from there and add enhancements like filters, grouping, threading, replies, forwards... imagination is the limit.


A bit off topic:
Someone made an excellent point about data retention on a mobile devices and these accumulated notifications are just a drop in a cup.
It is important to have control over app and lots of data it daily and accumulates it forever.
There should be a configuration about data retention both on the device and on the server with option to archive data or to completely delete it after certain period.
For example, keeping last 30 days on the device with key data points for trending should be more than enough whereas the rest can sit on the server and be downloaded temporary when pulled by user (in case you want to go back past 30 days and check some older stats without having to login over website).
Allowing users to delete old data would be nice bonus, with or without keeping historical trend data.
This should probably go into a separate topic, but I wouldn't hold my breath if something so simple as deleting notifications (which should have been there since day one) hasn't drawn enough attention for more than a year. And this is something that should have been caught during QA, if not earlier!

Finally, it speaks a lot about a company when a customer support instead of providing help to its consumers, recommends them to search for a solution on their community forum and then ignores so many calls for help in fixing a trivial flaw in their system.
It's no surprise many have pledged to switch to another brand.

[Sugar1924]

I agree with you many points, but before the notifications started to be retained 2/17 they just appeared on the lock screen and then disappeared, did any one complain about that? I agree, just like emails we should be able to pick and choose what to delete. However, all we can do is pick what we do not want to receive. We can not delete anything. All my exercise,sleep, food and intake can not be deleted, in fact if you scroll back to before you bought the Fitbit there are slots for that data.

Sent from my iPad

[Sugar1924]

I have no problem with these useless so called motivational notifications to auto delete after reading them. Having these continue to build up decreases user pleasure. At least they can be turned off, otherwise I’d be getting about 5 of these per day since I turned them off in November 2017, and every day I do not get one I thank JohnnyRow.

Sent from my iPad

[SunsetRunner]

The Community Forum has some bugs and after trying to fix my previous post it disappeared, so here is the full post:

I understand the rage around voting functionality, but that's simply the way Lithium works (it powers this Community Forum) 😞
It's based on Kudos feature which allows you to add or remove your kudos (vote) and can be configured to restrict how many kudos a user can give within configured time interval.
If you click on the vote number you can see all the users who gave their vote and check if you're in the list.
If you click on the thumbs up icon you can add or remove your vote, but current configuration prohibits voting more than once.

It's funny that there's a link with recently implemented suggestions ordered by "Hot":
https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/idb-p/features
Apparently, "Clock Faces Gallery UI Improvements" is the 2nd hottest suggestion as of now with 1 comment and 7 total votes!
However, this topic that was started on 04/15/2017 with 484 votes and 868 comments out of which 775 are new (obviously very hot) appears on the 7th page!
Feels like something is rigged in the way Fitbit considers discussions as hot, or web admin needs to be trained on how to configure Lithium 🙂

[Miner01]

I would like to be able to delete the build up notifications from the Fitbit app.that appear on my phone

[imtonyntx]

Ditto for the millionth time. Let us delete notifications in the app when they are received. It's not that hard to understand, and I know of no other app that doesn't let you do so. C'mon, Fitbit.