Manage admin notifications

How to catch up on pending comments and admin alerts

The Notifications page is a central inbox for alerts that need your attention as an admin. On this version of SGEN, every notification comes from your site’s comment queue — when a visitor leaves a comment that needs moderation, a notification appears here so you do not miss it.

What is this for?

Notifications is a central inbox for admin-facing alerts about things that need your attention. On this version, that means pending comments waiting for you to approve, reject, or mark as spam. Open the inbox to see what is waiting, then head to the Discussions area to act on each comment. Read state is tracked per admin — your Unread count is yours alone, even on a site with multiple admins.

Good use cases

The three tabs at the top of your inbox are the at-a-glance snapshot of what is waiting for you — each carries a live count of how many items are in that state for your user. A healthy morning check looks like this:

Example 1: Daily morning check — triage overnight comments. You run Acme Coffee Roasters and visitors leave comments on your blog posts overnight. You open /sg-admin/notifications/ with your morning coffee, filter to Unread, and see 6 new rows. Reading the snapshot above you see 6 Unread out of 8 All — six comments to triage before the store opens. Click View on any row to jump to the Discussions queue and approve or reject from there:

Note: Every View link in the list goes to the same URL — /sg-admin/discussions?status=pending — regardless of which comment the notification is about. Once you arrive on the Discussions page, use its search box to find the specific comment by commenter name.

Example 2: Post-comment-surge triage — find one commenter quickly. Acme Coffee Roasters published a new blog post and 12 visitors commented in the first hour. You remember Ada Lovelace left a question but you cannot recall whether you replied. Type Ada into the Search notifications box and press Enter. The inbox narrows to every notification whose title contains “Ada”. You see her row, its status badge tells you it is still Unread, and you click View to jump to Discussions:

Example 3: Weekly inbox zero — bulk-mark a quiet week read. It is Friday afternoon and you have been on top of comments all week — Acme Coffee Roasters had a calm 5 days. You open the All tab and see 5 rows, all already handled in Discussions. Tick the master checkbox in the header to select all 5, pick Mark as Read from Bulk actions, and click Apply. The list reloads, your Unread tab drops to zero, and every row moves to the Read tab:

Example 4: Bookmark URLs — reach specific inbox views in one click. Because the bell icon is not available in the top navigation on this version of SGEN, you rely on direct URLs. Bookmark these so you can reach your inbox views without typing every morning. Replace acmecoffee.com with your own site domain:

# Daily inbox — land on Unread with every comment waiting to triagehttps://acmecoffee.com/sg-admin/notifications/?status=unread# Weekly audit — see everything, read and unread, newest firsthttps://acmecoffee.com/sg-admin/notifications/?status=all# Searches — narrow the list by commenter name or keywordhttps://acmecoffee.com/sg-admin/notifications/?s=Adahttps://acmecoffee.com/sg-admin/notifications/?status=read&s=Ada

What NOT to use this for

• Do not rely on the bell icon in the top navigation — it is not rendering on this version of SGEN. You may remember a bell icon from older versions of SGEN or from screenshots other admins have shown you — on this version, the bell is suppressed and nothing in the admin chrome signals that notifications exist. A count exists behind the scenes but no UI surfaces it. Bookmark /sg-admin/notifications/ and make it part of your daily routine until the bell returns.

• Do not expect the View link on a notification to take you to that specific comment. On this version, every notification’s View button lands you on the same page — the generic Pending Discussions queue — regardless of which commenter or post the notification was about. If you have five notifications for five different comments, all five View links go to the same URL. Once you arrive on the Discussions page, use its search box or scan by commenter name to find the specific comment the notification was telling you about.
• Do not click View on an old notification without checking the comment still exists. If a comment has already been moderated (approved, marked as spam, or permanently deleted) since the notification was created, the notification row stays in your inbox but clicking View lands you on an empty queue with “No discussions found.” These stale rows do not auto-clean — expect some phantom entries in the inbox as your site accumulates history. Mark them read (or delete them) to keep the list tidy.
• Do not rely on this as your only alert channel. On this version, notifications are admin-dashboard only. No email, no text message, no push, no bell. If you need out-of-band alerts (for example, you are on vacation and need to know immediately when a comment comes in), set up email forwarding from your submission form or use a third-party tool — the Notifications page will not do that for you.
• Do not expect multi-user scoping to be airtight on bulk delete. On a site with several admins, bulk Delete does not respect per-admin scope. If one admin bulk-deletes notifications, the rows are removed for every admin on that site — not just dismissed from their own inbox. Coordinate with your team before running bulk delete, or use Mark as Read instead, which is safely scoped to you alone.

• Do not use this as a general activity log. Only pending comments create notifications on this version. Page publishes, redirect changes, media uploads, theme edits — none of those write to this inbox. If you need a full audit trail, look at the individual feature areas (for example, Pages history or Custom Codes history).

Before you start

• You are signed in to SGEN as an admin.
• You know the URL of your notifications inbox: /sg-admin/notifications/.
• You have a pending comment to triage (or you are scanning a known-quiet inbox to get familiar with the layout).

Where to go

1. Type /sg-admin/notifications/ into your browser address bar, or use the left navigation menu. There is no bell icon in the top navigation on this version — the direct URL is the primary entry point.
2. The page lists every notification addressed to you, newest first. Across the top you have three tabs: All, Unread, and Read. Each tab badge shows the count.
3. If you have zero notifications, the table shows “No notifications found.” — that is expected on a quiet site or a site without any public-facing comment traffic yet.

Steps

1. Scan the Unread tab

Click Unread at the top. The list narrows to only items you have not yet acted on. Your read/unread state is scoped to you — if a colleague marked an item read, your copy stays unread until you mark it yourself.

2. Open a specific notification

Click the View link inside a row to jump to the Discussions queue (filtered to pending comments). Approve or reject the comment there, then come back to the notifications list. Remember: every View link goes to the same page on this version, so use the Discussions search box to locate the specific comment named in the notification message.

3. Mark items read

Two ways to mark things read:

• One at a time: click Mark as Read inside a specific row. The row flips from red “Unread” to grey “Read” without reloading the page.
• In bulk: tick the checkbox on the left of each row you want to clear (or the master checkbox in the header to select everything on the current page), pick Mark as Read from the Bulk actions dropdown, and click Apply.

If you are cleaning up a backlog and are sure you have handled everything in the list, you can also use Delete from the Bulk actions dropdown — just be aware that on a multi-admin site, Delete removes the rows for everyone, not just you. When in doubt, prefer Mark as Read.

4. Search

Use the search box on the right of the toolbar to find a specific notification by keywords in the title or message body. This searches your own notifications only — not site-wide content. The search looks at the notification title and message text; commenter names appearing in the message body are searchable (for example, you can find every notification about “Alice” by searching for Alice).

What success looks like

• The Unread tab badge is 0 (or only shows items that arrived since you cleared the queue).
• The Discussions Pending tab is also 0 — remember, marking a notification read does not moderate the underlying comment. You still have to go to Discussions to approve or reject.
• When you come back tomorrow, any new pending comments from overnight are already waiting for you at the top of the inbox.

What to do if it does not work

• My inbox is empty. If every tab shows the count 0 and the table reads “No notifications found.”, that is what a quiet site looks like — no pending comments, no alerts, nothing to action. The list will populate automatically the next time a visitor submits a comment:

• I see notifications but clicking View takes me to an empty page. The underlying comments have already been moderated or deleted since the notifications were created. The row stays in your inbox but the destination page now shows “No discussions found.” Check the Approved, Spam, or Trash tabs in Discussions — the comment may have moved. Then mark the notification read or delete it to clear the stale row.
• My search returns nothing for a commenter I know is in the list. The search looks at title and message text only — if the commenter name is embedded in the message, it will match, but the title format (“Alice Smith on Introducing SGEN 3.0”) is what gets indexed. Try partial matches rather than exact phrases.
• I do not see a bell icon in the top navigation. Expected on this version of SGEN. Bookmark /sg-admin/notifications/ for direct access.
• My inbox looks different from a colleague’s. Read state is per-admin, but the list of notifications themselves is shared — if you and your colleague see completely different rows, check that you are both signed in to the same site and that your user roles are both admin-level. If a row you expected is missing for everyone, another admin may have used bulk Delete to remove it.
• I bulk-deleted a notification and want it back. Not possible on this version — there is no undo. Use Mark as Read for dismissals you might want to revisit.

How this connects to other features

• Discussions. This is the only feature that creates notifications on this version of SGEN. Every time a visitor submits a comment that needs moderation, a notification is added to your inbox. When you approve, spam, or delete a comment, the related notification stays in the inbox — marking the notification read (or deleting it) is a separate step from moderating the comment. If you clear your Discussions Pending queue and leave the notifications alone, the notifications become stale (their View link goes to an empty queue).
• Users. Notifications are scoped per-admin: your unread count is yours. When you mark an item read, other admins still see it as unread in their own inbox until they mark it themselves. The exception is bulk Delete, which removes the row from everyone’s inbox — prefer Mark as Read on multi-admin sites.

Next step

• Moderate the pending comments from the Discussions area. Clearing the Pending queue is what actually resolves the underlying work — marking notifications read without moderating just hides the reminder.
• Bookmark /sg-admin/notifications/ so you can reach it in one click every morning until the bell icon returns to the top navigation.