Notifications
The three kinds, how to turn each on or off, and what a push notification costs you in privacy.
Cordice can tell you about a message in three different ways, and they are separate settings because they have separate consequences.
They live in Settings → Notifications, in a browser or the desktop app, and in Settings → Notifications on Android.
Desktop notifications
The panels your operating system shows while Cordice is open. The setting is Enable Desktop Notifications, and its description says what it means plainly: you get notified while the tab is open. Close the tab and they stop.
Your browser will ask its own permission the first time. If you refuse it there, the switch here cannot override that — the refusal is remembered by the browser, and you have to change it in the browser’s own site settings.
Push notifications
These are the ones that reach you when Cordice is closed. Enable Push Notifications turns them on.
This is the one to think about. On Android there is no way to wake a sleeping app except through Google’s push service, so a notification about a message goes through Google carrying the sender’s name and the text of the message. That is true of every Android chat app that notifies you; ours is not an exception and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.
Web push is different. The payload is encrypted before it leaves our servers and only your browser can decrypt it, so the push service sees that something arrived and nothing about what it says.
If that matters to you, leave push off. Cordice works without it — messages arrive as usual while the app is open. The full account of this is in the privacy policy.
Sounds
Separate again, and individually switchable: a message arriving, a message sent, someone joining or leaving a call, a stream starting or ending, mute, unmute, deafen, undeafen, somebody moved between channels.
Each can be turned off on its own, so you can keep the one that tells you a call has started and silence the one that fires on every message.
Quieting a place rather than everything
Turning notifications off entirely is a blunt instrument. Right-click a server and choose Mute Server, or a channel and choose Mute Channel, and everything else carries on as before.
Muting asks for how long: 15 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, 8 hours, 24 hours, or until I turn it back on. The timed options are the useful ones — they are how you get through an evening without waking up a week later having silently missed something.
Mute the channel that never stops rather than the app that occasionally matters.