Notifications not working no matter what I do

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1

Hi,

I have a problem with notifications on our XWiki (16.10.3) instance. Although the notifications.enabled property is set to true in the xwiki.properties file, notifications seem to be disabled in the administer settings.

The activity stream is also not working properly - instead of showing activity, it only displays $notifs in the user profile. In addition, the bell icon for notifications does not appear in the upper right corner of the page.

I’ve tried reinstalling the Notifications Application and removing other extensions, but the problem persists.

In addition, the “custom” button next to the “create” button when clicked displays a message related to $watchedStatus

Has anyone experienced something similar or have any ideas on how to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

2

Hi @mateuszt,

It seems you upgraded you XWiki instance from a version that had Activity Stream application installed.
This application was deprecated and replaced by Notifications Application.
In this case you have 2 options:

Hope it helps,
Alex

3

Hi @acotiuga,

Thanks for your response. I checked everything, but unfortunately, nothing has changed.

  • The Activity Stream was already uninstalled before, so that wasn’t the issue.
  • I followed the steps in the link you provided
  • The Notifications Application is installed, but notifications still don’t work.

The issues remain the same: no notifications bell, no activity stream in the user profile (just $notifs displayed), and notifications appear disabled in settings despite notifications.enabled = true in xwiki.properties.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

4

Check the XWiki.Alerts.Code.AlertsMenuUIX document. That is responsible with the notification bell display.

5

There is nothing in this document. Only in the objects is the code that hides the bell when there are no notifications. Even if I manually trigger the bell to show up, it still shows an empty list when I click on it

6

@acotiuga have You got any other solutions for this problem?

7

@mateuszt is your instance a new one or an upgraded one? Judging by the velocity variables you mentioned, it looks like the notification system is missing parts and we need to understand and we need to understand what caused it.

You also mentioned that you reinstalled Notifications application and removed other extensions. Are there any differences between the initial state of the problem and the problem after these operations?

8

I’ll describe everything step by step to avoid any misunderstandings.

I’ve been working in our organization since June 2024. At that time, our XWiki instance was running version 15.10.10, and all the issues I mentioned earlier were already present. However, my colleagues say that notifications used to work before.

While unsuccessfully searching for a solution, we had the idea to update to a newer version. At the end of 2024, we created a clone of our instance so that changes wouldn’t affect the main production instance. However, all the issues still persisted.

Then, on the test instance, we upgraded to 16.10.3. This didn’t fix the problem, but two things changed:

  • A “custom” button appeared next to the document creation button.
  • In the notification settings, filter options became available - but they still don’t work.

That’s all that changed.

As for uninstalling other extensions or reinstalling the Notifications Application - it didn’t change anything. Everything remained the same.

Initially, the notification bell was visible in the top bar. However, when clicked, it only displayed a message about an expired license for paid extensions, which we used during the production deployment of our instance. After removing those extensions, the bell disappeared completely.