No Message Notifications

[kcdermodywriter]

I haven't been receiving any message notifications for the last 2 days but have several messages in my in box. Double checked that my settings weren't changed, nothing in spam, no where. Anyone else noticing this? Wondering if it's site wide or a problem with my account. 

[ashrafkhan81]

Karen, I did not face the notification problem. But since the last two days, Upwork messenger has been acting weird! 

I see a new message counter on the desktop app, like the one we get on the phone, showing the count of the unread messages but when I open the messenger I do not see any message. That seemed weird, so I closed and restarted the app and there were several new messages now! 

So I do not any new messages on the app right away, first, the message prompt appears, then I have to restart the app and then the messages are shown! 

I can't be the only one? Or am I? 

[kcdermodywriter]

Weird, I'm not having that issue, you might want to report it to support. I may need to do the same for the notification problem as it might be just my account since no one else has mentioned that but I'll give it a day and see if it corrects itself.

[BojanS]

Hi  Karen and Ashraf,

We’ll have one of our agents reach out to you via support tickets to assist you with these issues. 

Thank you for your patience! 

[kcdermodywriter]

Thank you! 

[kcdermodywriter]

Just an FYI, someone did contact me on Thursday the 7th and asked if I had the message room open - the messages came in when I was totally offline, one at 1:30 am because she's in Germany. I replied right away, sending the link to the threads as the rep requested, but never heard again. I even added another response to let the support person know it was still continuing. So this is still ongoing, I haven't been receiving message notifications for almost a week. In the past when I've received assistance from support, messages were normally replied to that day or within the next 24 hours, but it has been awhile and of course now it's the weekend so maybe it's taking longer now. 

I'm just updating this as I received an email from Upwork to mark the reply as an accepted solution if it's been resolved. 

[g_vasilevski · Accepted solution]

Hi Karen,

Rest assured, our engineering team is investigating this further and once our team has more details one of our team members will update your ticket. If you have any additional questions, you can also update your ticket at any time as well. Thank you.

[kcdermodywriter]

Thanks I'll close this out.

[kcdermodywriter]

Hi Goran,

Is there a way to check on this? This is still an ongoing issue and I've posted multiple threads where I haven't received notifications to the support ticket without a response in almost a week now. Today I lost 2 potential jobs because of it, the most recent message I received a notification on but it was 2 hours later (most I've never received at all) - it was a client asking for work that had to be completed today so I missed out entirely. The other one was a client trying to set up a phone/Zoom meeting through Upwork early this morning. I've been on the site since it started, over 6 years now and have paid thousands of dollars to Upwork through the projects of worked on plus the monthly fees. In the few times I've needed Upwork support there has at least been a reply within a day or so. This is really concerning. 

[kcdermodywriter]

typo: projects "I've" worked on.

[JoanneP]

Hi Karen,

I'm sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you. I see that you already have an open ticket and our technical team is already handling this case. They will update your ticket to assist you further. 

[jeremiah-brown]

Goran (or whoever can answer this), when is this issue going to be fixed or addressed?  I see the various community managers post the same answer every time this problem gets posted to the forum.  This post was made in 2021, its now 2022, and this is still a problem.

I have lost thoussands of dollars in contracts because of this problem - clients who were communicating with me regarding contracts then went with someone else because I never responded (because I did not get notified there was a message).

Could we get more information on this?  This problem has been an ongoing issue for the entire time I have been a member here on the website, and has never been taken care of.    

[kcdermodywriter]

I'm curious to know as well. This is actually an old thread but the problem came back again over two weeks ago. I reported it and was told to change my settings that had been the same since the site started - after that the rep learned that there was a bug and I was told my ticket was on hold while they work on it. In another thread here that I was just looking for, it says the latest problem was corrected but it's not. Some days I get notifications and others I don't - just went in to double-check and saw I missed one. This is having serious ramifications, when the clients aren't responded to they go elsewhere. 

[hpg-mheck]

I just missed a contract for this very issue and I'm furious.

I have been logging in every day, and I always see badges over "Notifications" for whatever idiotic business nonsense on your end you're particularly proud of, but none over "Messages".

YOU CANNOT DO THAT.

If you display badges over "Notifications", ANY modern user is going to expect to see an unread message count badge of the same type over "Messages".

That MUST WORK.  ALWAYS.  All day long, every day, flood, fire, panic, muder, war, locusts, whatever.  THAT *MUST WORK*.  As God is my witness, if you have a developer that cannot get that work, **Edited for Community Guidelines**

The client replied LESS THAN AN HOUR after I replied to him, and I never knew about it.  I wondered why the hell he reposted the job a few days later-- and now I know: it was YOUR fault.

Now that I know to NEVER trust your software to tell me what's really going on, I can take steps to avoid the problem-- namely, always explicitly checking "Messages" whether I see a notification or not-- but guess what level of confidence that gives me in THE ACCURACY OF YOUR BILLING?

Regards,

Matt Heck

[hpg-mheck]

(The relevant design principle here, by the way, is known as "The Principle of Least Surprise", and few things inspire the levels of frustration and anger in users as breaking it.)

[NikolaS]

Hi Matt,

I am sorry for the frustration this has caused. I shared your report with our team and one of our agents already reached out to you directly via a support ticket to assist you further. You can access your ticket on this page.

[6a6db855]

I also find Upwork is unreliable at sending notifications, and I've also missed out on work from repeat clients because of it. I've reported it before and not got anywhere. 90% of the time it works fine, but sometimes it just randomly fails to send an email about a new message, and I don't find out about it until I get another message several days later chasing it up.

[hpg-mheck]

Yes.  For exactly this reason, I absolutely cannot use "in band" messaging on UpWork for primary communications on a project.  They are clearly not up to it.