Search in GitHub Notifications has no effect

[peter-lyons-kehl]

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Bug

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Search (filter) in (free/public, put possibly paid, too) GitHub Notifications https://github.com/notifications has no effect (is ignored, it doesn't filter any notifications out).

https://github.com/notifications?query=nonsense shows "nonsense" in the filter field, but it still lists all my notifications. Similar for any other word (regardless if the word does appear in any of my notifications, or not). I've tried this in two browsers (current Chrome and Firefox).

(UPDATE: This may affect private/paid GitHub, too - I don't know.)

[peter-lyons-kehl]

[RoboMWM]

also having this issue, I guess people don't search their github notifications..?

[BartMassey]

Me too. Is notifications search a paid feature or something?

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[SHU-red]

Same for me
I dont understand how this is meant to work ...

[psifertex]

So the answer is that particular UI isn't MEANT to be a generic filter. It can only filter on particular properties and the UI doesn't make that at all obvious:

https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/managing-subscriptions-and-notifications-on-github/viewing-and-triaging-notifications/managing-notifications-from-your-inbox#custom-filter-limitations

Note that they state that it cannot search the titles of issues. The ONLY filtering possible is:

Filter by repository with repo:
Filter by discussion type with is:
Filter by notification reason with reason:
Filter by notification author with author:
Filter by organization with org:

[BartMassey]

They should also support header: and body: and text: search, with the latter being the default. This is almost always what I actually want. I wonder why this isn't true already?

Thanks much for figuring this out. I never would have.

[psifertex]

Full disclosure -- I didn't figure it out myself, I contacted support and they eventually discovered it though their initial reaction was the same.

[psifertex]

And yes, title, or text search would be infinitely more useful. Sadly I guess it's not a priority.

[mikkorantalainen]

If the search input doesn't support words without specific prefixes, why not show an error message when you write e.g. "Linux mm" in the search input? Right now, the UI simply appears as totally broken to the user.

[ilovehans10]

It's even more confusing because this search is themed the same as a PR/Issue search, and both of those support searching without prefixes.

[danielschenk]

Also, negated queries (as described in the search syntax) don't work for me. Would be super useful for me as I'm part of several orgs which I would like to exclude in my notification overview, when working on private projects.

[manio]

+1 on this. Today I was searching some older issue. When I was searching for project name, issue/discussion title it has no effect. And I can see the issue is there!

[suprjinx]

+1 on this -- I can't filter Notifications in any useful way. I want to see all Dependabot PRs? Nope. Hide the PR notifications if already merged? Nope.

[LisaBosCesium]

+1 on this. Who wouldn't want text search as the number 1 way to filter?