I am creating a crowdsourced Q&A page (like an internal “reddit”) and have included buttons for people to click to be automatically notified when 1) a new question is added and 2) an answer is added to a question they subscribe to. See my example doc (https://coda.io/d/Crowdsourced-Q-A-Example-Doc_diH8yzjdOrR).
However, as I’m testing the functionality, I’m getting more automatic notifications that I should. Does anyone know how I can fix this in a formula or setting?
When I add a new question: I get 2 automatic notifications (instead of just one).
When I add an answer to a question: I get multiple notifications instead of one. Ex. I’m getting 5 notifications – perhaps it’s because I’m currently subscribed to 5 questions?
I believe what is happening here is that you as the creator of the doc and the table are also subscribed to notifications of things that happen in the table. You can turn off these notification settings for any table or canvas of any doc that you have view privileges for.
Hi @Van-Anh_Su! One other thing you might want to take a look at in your automatoin for issue 2
It looks like right now your automatoin action is sending notifications to the entire Subscribers column in the Questions table, no matter which question triggers the automation (under the “to” field here:)
Any time you see “Table Name - Column” like this in a building block, that’s telling us that we’re going to apply an action or operation to the entire column as opposed to specific rows.
Instead, try using Step 1 Result.Questions.Subscribers in that “to” field. You’ll need to use the formula toggle in the action, since there isn’t a Step 1 result option in the action dropdown. That will look like this:
The notation there is saying “for the row that triggered this automation (Step 1 Result), use the Questions.Subscribers field as the ‘to’ field.” Normally, Step 1 Result.Column Name will pull the associated column form a row, but in this case we’re working with related lookup tables and need that extra little bit of dot notation, because you want a field associated with the question table.
Give that a try and let me know if you have questions – I hope that helps!
Thanks so much for your help! I changed my notifications settings to “Mentions and subscribed only” in the doc, Questions table, and Answers table. For some reason I’m still getting 2 automatic notifications when I add a new question?
Thanks again for your help on this!
@Hannah - your process worked to fix issue 2! Thank you so much for the step-by-step explanation.
