The Notification Bell and the Announcements Page: What Arrives, and What You Can Do About It

Where the bell is

The bell sits in the top bar of every page, on the right-hand group of icons: next to your credits (the ✦ number) and just to the left of your round avatar. On a wider screen it comes after the Ask button and the settings gear; on a narrow one it is simply one of the three things the top bar keeps — credits, bell, avatar. The episode editor has the same top bar, so you can check it while you are working on a storyboard.

You have to be signed in. There is no bell for visitors, and the announcements page asks you to sign in before it shows anything. Everything in the bell belongs to the account you are signed in with — on another device, or in another browser, the same messages are there with the same read state.

What the red number means

The small red badge on the bell is the number of messages you have not opened. It counts everything published for you: the announcements that go to everyone, plus the replies written to you. It shows only when the number is above zero; read everything and the badge disappears.

Two things about the number are worth knowing. First, it is not limited the way the list is — the bell shows only the most recent messages, while the number counts every unread one, so after a quiet week the number can be larger than the rows you can see. Second, it refreshes about every half minute while you have a page open. The bell gives a short ring when the number goes up, and while unread messages remain it repeats roughly every minute and a half; that is a reminder, not an alarm.

What can arrive

Announcements are published in the interface language you are using. If no translation exists yet for that language, you see the original wording rather than an empty message. Switching the interface language switches announcements to that language too, the next time the list loads.

Two of the labels are coloured the same way on purpose: Feedback and Help are both answers to you personally, while the other five are announcements. Only the last two behave differently when you click them.

Reading messages in the bell

1. Click the bell. A panel opens with Notifications at the top, View all in the corner, and a small cross to close it. An empty list says No notifications.
2. Read the rows. Each row has a purple dot if it is unread, a title, a coloured label, up to two lines of the message, and the date it was published. Rows you have already read look dimmer.
3. Announcement rows take you to the announcements page. Clicking one marks it read and leaves the bell; the announcements page opens on its list. That message is not opened for you there — click its card on the page to read it in full.
4. Feedback and Help rows open in place. Clicking one marks it read and expands the whole answer inside the panel — the panel stays open and nothing else on the page moves. For a Help reply, your original question is shown first under Your question, and the answer under Official Reply.
5. Read more for a long answer. The bell shows about five lines of a reply. If the text is cut off, a Read more link appears and opens that one message on the announcements page in a wider window, where the links inside the text can be clicked.
6. Answer from there. Under a feedback reply, History opens your feedback records so you can see the whole exchange. Under a question reply, Still not solved? Tell us more reopens the Ask window on the same conversation, carrying over what was asked, so you can push further without starting over.
7. The small cross on the right of a row hides that message from the bell for the rest of this visit and counts it as read. It is not deleted: the announcements page still lists it, and it is back in the bell after you reload.

Read and unread, exactly

Three actions mark a message read: clicking its row in the bell, clicking its card on the announcements page, and pressing the small cross on a row in the bell. Hovering, scrolling the list, opening the panel and closing it again do not. There is no “mark all as read” button, so if you want the badge to clear, open the messages you care about — or press the cross on the ones you do not.

Where you see the difference: in the bell, an unread row has a purple dot on the left and full contrast, a read one is dimmed and has no dot. On the announcements page, an unread message has a purple dot on the date line and a New label at the right of its card; a read one has a grey dot and no label. Read state is kept on your account, so opening a message on your phone clears it on your desktop too.

The announcements page

Open it with View all at the top of the bell panel. It is also a page of its own: once you are signed in, /announcements goes straight there.

The page shows the same messages as the bell, newest first, on a dated timeline. It shows the most recent ones rather than everything ever published. When more than one kind of message is on the page, a row of filter buttons appears above the list — All, followed by one button per label present on the page; press one to see only that kind, press All to come back.

Clicking a card opens it in a popup: the label, the full date, the title and the whole text, with links you can click. Closing it is the small cross in the corner, the Esc key, or a click outside the popup. A Promo announcement has a footer with a Top up button that opens the top-up page. A Feedback or Help announcement has a footer link instead — History or Still not solved? Tell us more — which does the same thing as the link in the bell. With nothing to show, the page says No announcements.

Does any of this arrive by email?

Announcements do not. They live in the bell and on the announcements page, and nothing about them is emailed; the unsubscribe link in our emails does not apply to them either.

A reply to your feedback is different: it always appears in the bell and in your feedback records, and an email copy is sent only if, at the moment you sent the feedback, you chose an address to be written to — your account address or another one. If you chose Just show the reply here, there is no email. A reply to a question you asked in the Ask window stays in the bell and is never emailed. The emails we send, and how to stop the reminders lists everything that does arrive by mail.

What each part is not

If something does not look right

The bell is empty but you expected something. Check that you are signed in with the account the message was sent to; the bell only works while signed in, and the panel shows the most recent messages, not a history. The announcements page shows the same most recent messages — it is not a longer archive, so anything older than the list is not there either.

The red number will not go away. The number counts every unread message, while the bell and the announcements page both show only the most recent ones. Open — or dismiss with the cross — the unread rows the list shows and the count drops with each. Any unread messages older than the list are shown on neither page, and the number still counts them.

A reply you read yesterday is gone. A person can withdraw a reply they sent. When that happens the message is removed from the bell and from the announcements page, and it no longer counts as unread.

The quote of your question has vanished from a Help reply. Help conversations are kept for a limited time. After the original is cleared, the reply still shows the answer; only the quotation of what you asked disappears.

You are waiting on a video and nothing rings. The bell is not a progress display — a running generation shows its state on the project and episode cards. What each task status means explains those.

FAQ

Updated October 10, 2026