Education Ecosystem Blog

At livecoding.tv users can subscribe to various streams particularly those that peak their interest, whether they’re a fan of another user, a language, or to keep abreast of the community. There are 4 types of notifications that are emailed directly to subscribers so that they don’t miss a beat. 

Here we’re going to explain the different types and the triggers behind the firing of each stream’s email notification.

Channel notifications   
When browsing the site you may become interested in a particular streamer’s channel, whether because of the project that they’re working on or their narrative style when coding. Once you visit a streamer’s channel like Mmcfarland’s and press the “follow” button, you’ve just subscribed to a channel notification. This means each time Mmcfarland goes live a notification email is fired to you saying the streamer is online.

You can also visit the Streamer Discovery tab to find new steamers at various levels in expertise and your language of choice to follow.

Category notifications
If you did not follow a specific streamer, but you were more interested in a programming language, e.g. Python, by visiting your notification settings you can update your category notifications to include Python, the level you’re interested in and language. Upon doing that you’ve created a category notification. When a stream goes live and the meta-data matches your category notification settings, an email is fired to you.

Country notifications

Country notifications are meant for viewers who want to be notified of all streams for their country or the ones that they’re interested in. For example if you are from Poland and you want to be notified of all streams from Poland, you go on your country notification tab and select Poland. You will then be notified of any streams coming from that country such as Noisy the moment he comes online.

Here you decide whenever you want email notifications when someone from a given country starts streaming.

Viewer notifications
Viewer notifications are notifications that you can set to follow other viewers on Livecoding.tv.
Santi from Barcelona and Vercantez from Texas met on Livecoding.tv and are now friends. By using this feature Santi can subscribe to be notified each time Vercantez is online so that he can hang out with him on streams using the livechat for general discussion and exchanging info.
Viewer notifications will be released in Livecoding.tv 2.4

Notification limitations
NOTIFY_STREAM_LIVE_MIN_TTL = 60*2 # delay time before firing a stream notification is 2 minutes
NOTIFY_STREAM_LIVE_MIN_INTERVAL = 60*1 # Min interval in minutes, between notifications from the same stream
NOTIFY_STREAM_MAX_DAILY_COUNT = 2 # Max number of category notifications a streamer can fire per day
NOTIFY_LIVESTREAM_SUB_MAX_DAILY_COUNT = 3 # max no. of channel notifications a viewer can receive per day
NOTIFY_CATEGORY_SUB_MAX_DAILY_COUNT = 3 # max no. of category notifications a viewer can receive per day
NOTIFY_COUNTRY_SUB_MAX_DAILY_COUNT = 10 # max no. of country notifications a viewer can receive per day
NOTIFY_VIEWER_SUB_MAX_DAILY_COUNT = 10 # max no. of viewer notifications a viewer can receive per day

To avoid sending too many notifications to viewers, we have set some limitations on how many notifications a streamer can fire in a defined time interval and also how many notifications a viewer can receive per day. After a streamer has fired 1 notification, there is a 60 minutes waiting period before he can fire the next. A streamer can fire per day maximum of 2 category stream notifications. To avoid viewers getting too many notifications, the number of channel or category notifications a viewer can receive per day is set to maximum 3 for each. The limitation on the number of country notifications or viewer notifications per day is 10 each. In Livecoding.tv 2.5 viewers can remove these limitations and set their personal preference on their dashboard.

Deletion of stream notifications
To avoid stale notifications where users never open stream notifications and we keep sending them, we automatically deactivate all notifications that are 30 days old, received more than 20 notifications but never clicked on the “Watch Now” button.

That wraps up this article’s explanation on notifications, if you need additional info or help you can get in contact with us on our Support page. Do you have any suggestions for what you’d like to be notified about? Pitch us your idea below in the comments