Chapter Notifications: Never Miss a New Chapter
Chapter notifications on Cogweald tell you when something happens to a story you care about — a new chapter on a world you follow, your own story's daily chapter, a reply to your comment — through the header bell, a full notifications page, and email for the events that matter most. Here's how the pieces fit.
The bell: what's new at a glance
The header bell is the ambient layer — a running list of recent notifications with an unread indicator. Click it for the last several events without leaving the page; the full history lives on the notifications page, which pages back through everything. For a daily serial reader, the bell's real job is the morning check: did my stories publish?
What triggers a notification
- New chapters on stories you follow — the core use case: your followed world published, here's the chapter.
- Your own world's chapter — creators get a notice when their story publishes, plus a separate alert if a chapter generation fails after retries.
- Story events — a world hitting its chapter cap, a story concluding, subscription status changes on your account.
- Comments — new comments on your world reach you as creator, and replies reach the comment's author — that's how the pseudonymous comment threads stay alive between chapters.
Recurring events are deduplicated — the system won't stack fifteen identical "your story is at the cap" notices.
The notification types themselves are worth a skim, because they map to the lifecycle of a story: chapter published, new chapter for followers, hint addressed, story concluded, chapter cap reached, chapter failed, comment activity, subscription changes. If you know the types, a glance at the bell tells you not just that something happened but which part of the story's lifecycle moved — the difference between "chapter published" and "chapter failed" is exactly the difference between checking and acting.
Email: for the events that shouldn't wait
Some notifications also go out by email — the ones a user plausibly needs to act on even when not visiting: a chapter that failed to generate, a world hitting its chapter cap, a story concluding, comment activity on your story. Routine "new chapter published" pings stay on-site where they belong, which keeps the email channel meaningful rather than noisy.
Notifications vs RSS vs just checking
They're complementary, not redundant. Notifications are push — events find you. The per-story RSS feed is pull — chapters arrive in your reader alongside everything else you follow. And the library is the memory — what you've actually read. Most settled readers end up using all three for different jobs.
The design intent behind splitting them: a notification you can safely ignore keeps the channel trustworthy. If every chapter emailed you, you'd mute it in a week; because only meaningful events email, an email from Cogweald is actually worth opening — and the routine stuff is exactly one glance at the bell away.
The setup is automatic: follow a story or create a world and the notifications start — sign up and tomorrow's chapter will introduce itself.
Sources
- Cogweald — Reader #7: How Pseudonymous Comments Work on Cogweald, https://www.cogweald.com/blog/pseudonymous-comments-reader-numbers
- Cogweald — Following Stories and Your Reading Library, https://www.cogweald.com/blog/following-stories-reading-library