Notifications rule our lives. From the little red badge on our messaging apps telling us someone is trying to talk to us, to handy popups letting us know our food delivery is on its way, we can’t get away from the little nuisances. But what happens when we get reliant on those notifications?

Continuing with their recent habit of making huge changes without telling anyone, Twitch has decided to update its notification settings to what it is calling “Smart Notifications.” In the email sent to all users of the platform on August 27, 2018 they describe the change:

Today we turned on Smart Notifications for you, which personalize where you get notifications.

When a streamer goes live, you’ll now get a notification in just one place based on where you’re using Twitch.

Twitch Email

And if you’ve been in the chat of a popular streamer recently, you’ll know the havoc these “Smart Notifications” are wreaking on fans across the site.

The most common complaint is not getting notified when a streamer goes live and this is all down to how the new notifications work.

Previously, when the streamers you followed went live you could get a notification on-site, in your email, and on your mobile phone all at the same time so you wouldn’t miss a second of the stream.

Now, by default, Twitch will only send a notification to ONE of those channels so if you’re not paying attention to – say – your email, you might never know that someone went live.

How it works

When your favorite streamer goes live now, Twitch walks through the following sequence to determine the best place to send the notification:

1. Are you currently on the Twitch site or app? If so, you will get an alert in the notifications area on Twitch.tv.
2. If you’re not currently on the site or app, did you sign up for mobile notifications? In that case, the Twitch will ignore sending you a notification on-site, and will instead send you a mobile notification.
3. What if you haven’t signed up for mobile notifications and you aren’t currently on the site or app? When all else fails, you will get an email alerting you.

Since most people check their email inboxes less and less these days, that means potential missed notifications, and lots of missed lulz.

What can be done?

Well, you can either just stay awake 24 hours a day and never leave the site hoping you don’t miss a notification.

OR

You can go to https://www.twitch.tv/settings/notifications to customize your settings.

You can either scroll down and configure your notifications by notification type (Mobile or Email), or turn off Smart Notifications entirely at the top of the page.

Just flip this switch off and all notifications will work exactly as they did a few days ago. You’ll get notifications through all notification channels and you can go right back to drowning in Twitch notifications.