Security, community and product notices arrive in one in-app inbox at /notifications. Here is what each category carries, which parts you can switch off, and why nothing ever reaches your email.
Most creative tools answer the question what happened while I was away by sending you mail. Novus answers it in one place inside the app, at /notifications, and sends you nothing at all. No email, no push, no SMS. If you never open the page, the only thing you miss is the page.
That is a deliberate trade, and it has consequences worth understanding: what lands in the inbox, what you can turn off, what you cannot, and what the little bell in the top navigation is actually telling you when it goes quiet.
Every notification carries exactly one category: Security, Community or Product. The inbox has a filter chip for each plus an All view, and the same three names appear in the Inbox preferences panel at the bottom of the page.
Why Security is not negotiable
A sign-in notice you can disable is a sign-in notice an attacker can disable. Every other category is a preference; this one is the record that something happened to your account, so it is the one setting the product refuses to take from you.
Nothing here is generated on a schedule. Each notice is written at the moment the thing happened, inside the same database transaction as the change itself, which is why you never see a follow notification for a follow that failed.
On the Security side: a passkey being added, your recovery-code set being replaced, a password reset performed with a recovery code (which also revokes every existing session), an account suspension or restoration, and a successful sign-in. That last one is deduplicated: if a sign-in notice was written for you less than a minute ago, another one is skipped, so a client that re-establishes a session several times in a row does not bury the rest of your inbox.
On the Community side: someone follows you, comments on one of your published visualizers, likes or saves it, or remixes it. All four are written only when the actor is not you, so liking your own post is not an event you get told about. Moderation outcomes go to the person who filed the report, carrying the resolution text the moderator wrote.
On the Product side: publishing a project writes a notice pointing at its immutable community revision, and team announcements are fanned out to an audience (everyone, creators, or moderators). An announcement respects your Product preference: if you have it switched off, you are counted as suppressed rather than delivered, and the receipt the admin sees says so in as many words.
The bell in the top navigation carries an unread badge. It refreshes when you change page, when the window regains focus, on a sixty-second timer, and immediately when something in the current tab changes read state, because the inbox and the bell listen to the same in-page event rather than polling each other.
The interesting part is what happens when that refresh fails. The bell does not fall back to zero. It keeps the last count it knew, adds a small amber dot, and changes its own accessible name to say the count is last-known and notifications are unavailable. A delivery failure that reads as an empty inbox is the worst possible lie for a notification system to tell, so it does not tell it.
An empty list and a broken list look different on purpose
If the inbox cannot load, you get a red panel with a Retry button and the sentence This is a load failure, not an empty inbox. If it loads and there is genuinely nothing in that filter, you get the quiet line Nothing in this filter yet. Two states, two appearances, no guessing.
An item with a destination is a link, and following it marks that item read on the way out. An item without one is still clickable and does nothing but mark itself read. Mark all read is one request; the button disables itself when the unread count is zero, so you cannot fire a pointless write.
There is no infinite scroll. The list returns the newest items up to a ceiling of 100, and the unread tally is itself counted against a cap of 100, which is why a very busy account shows 99+ on the page and 9+ on the bell rather than a number that would take a full table scan to be exactly right. For a notification badge, more than you want to read is the honest answer and the cheap one.
One quiet safety detail: the destination on a notification is validated before it ever becomes a link. Anything that does not start with a single forward slash is dropped and the item renders as plain text. A notification body can carry a moderator's words or another creator's post title, and none of that is allowed to become an off-site link inside your own inbox.
Open Inbox preferences at the bottom of /notifications, untick Community or Product, and press Save. The change takes effect on the next load of the inbox and the bell, both of which re-read your enabled categories server-side rather than filtering in the browser, so an unwanted category is not merely hidden: it is never sent to the page.
If the preferences panel cannot reach the server, its controls stay disabled rather than pretending to be editable, and a Reload link appears. A settings form that lets you toggle a switch it cannot save is a form that lies to you twice.
Because nothing is emailed, the inbox is the whole channel. If you publish to the community and want to know when people respond, check it. If you have turned Community off, nobody has failed to reach you; you asked not to be told. And because Security cannot be disabled, the one notification that matters most is the one you will always find, sitting at the top of the Security filter with a link straight to your security settings.
If you are still setting an account up, From Private Draft to Community Remix covers what publishing does and therefore what starts generating community activity in the first place. If you would rather find things than be told about them, Search Across Novus is the other half of the same story.
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