When I started this suggestion, the main reason was to improve the descriptiveness of notifications as I had trouble finding pings to specific threads. However, as I was writing my ideas for improvements, I realised I believe there is a lot to improve to the notification system. The original intro (see below) therefore is mostly focussed on the descriptiveness, but the actual suggested improvements go a lot further than that.

Right now all forum mentions show up as exactly the same thing in the botht he notification overview and the pop-up message with the link. When you are searching for a specific forum mention it can be quite a hassle to find the one you are looking for, involving a lot of clicking and opening new pages.

Same goes for forum activity for subscriptions in terms of how they show up in the notification overview. Luckily here it at least explicitly mentions which thread was posted in when the pop up opens, making it clear more quickly what the notification is referring to.

I guess all of this is made even worse by the fact that notifications aren't truly sorted on time. Instead some types of notifications are prioritized in their showing, making it even more difficult to figure out which forum notification you are looking for.

Ideally what I'd like to see is the following:

- the notification itself in the main overview links to the forum directly (e.g. abolish the pop-up window, which is just an extra click)

- when it comes to pings, the notification itself immediately mentions who pinged you and in what thread

- when it comes to subscribed post notifications, the notification itself immediately mentions in what thread

- when it comes to subscribed post notifications, the link takes you to the actual new post, and not the first page (if more than 1 new post has been made, ideally it links to the first new post that was made that triggered the notification to pop up)

- new messages don't also give a notification. Just make the 'messages' button in the notification overview indicate that there is something new

- order notification in actual chronological order

- allow us to delete notifications, with bulk delete options (I really have 0 desire to look at my expired flea market notifications hogging up the first few spots in my notification overview

- always show old notifications, but make new/unread notifications bold or otherwise visually different from notifications that were already read

- allow us to sort, filter and search notifications

- allow us to read notifications (and thus removing the big screaming red number indicating unread notifications on every page) without claiming the items. Instead use a different visualisation for notifications containing items that are still to be claimed.

- Make the notification page an actual page and not a pop-up. That allows for freedom to make improvements without cluttering it too much.

Edit to add:

- Give us toggles to allow for notifications for professions. For example when the mining cart is full or emptied (basically whenever the wolf is just chilling), a plant is done growing, the crafting queue is ready, etc. Definitely make this feature opt-in though, cause I know a lot of people would hate it to receive these kind of notifications, but others might appreciate if they tend to forget (like me).

An idea spawning off of Twicup's suggestion below, perhaps it would be beneficial if not 'everything' goes through notifications.I know that everyone hates how a lot of comparisons are made to Flight Rising, but I think this part they did really neatly (referring to their achievement system and auction house system)

A. achievements are awarded immediately upon claiming, rather than claiming (click) resulting in a notification (click) that again needs to be claimed (another click). Just award it directly, or if this is too difficult, make a specific section within the Achievements page

B. The proceeds of Flea market sales, and items of expired listings, either are placed immediately into the inventory (with just a notification that it happened), or same with the achievements suggestion above, make a separate section/page within the flea market system where listings, expirations and sales can be managed and claimed, rather than hogging up to notifications. I don't mind if there is a notification that a listing has been sold or expired, but the actual claiming of items would be neater within the flea market section

Further suggestions I support this wholeheartedly:
- Specify what item sold in the flea market in the flea market sale title. Have the price and further be in the message itself.
- Specify what achievement was completed (or achievement line) in the achievement notification. I cannot tell you how exhausting it is to have to search all of my achievements to figure out which ones are in which category. "Campaign Achievement Reward Delivery" would make it easier to navigate. I'm not too sure how it looks on the backend, so it may be visually helpful to both sides.
- Allow the option to not respond to friend requests and remove the Red ! if it's been opened.
- Remove the "Forum Activity" alert if we are the one to post last in a thread. It shouldn't trigger on our own posts.

The notifications on LW are still so very basic, and deeply uninformative the way they are now. Even "just" the ability to visually sort messages from forum activity and auction house fluff based on what kind of icon pops up would be useful, but the rest are still useful suggestions and would go towards making the system as a whole much more usable. At the moment we have no sense of which notifications are telling us about things it would be nice to have a quick response time for, and which are functionally just fodder-selling or studding spam.

I support this sort of overhaul, and the great additions by Twicup.