Google+ red box syndrome: Deal with it!

Different ways to to look at your Notifications:

When you click open the 'View all notifications' stream view from the Red Box, there are different ways to view your mentions and comments.

Check the top of the page and the 'More' dropdown menu and there you will find:

- Your posts (Other people have commented, +1:d or shared)

- Mentions of you (+mentions of your name on posts / comments and private messages)

- Photos of you (You have been tagged in a photo)

- Other people's posts (posts with your own comments or posts that others have shared with you, also from any Subscription circles)

- Games notifications


I found many +mentions of me here which I didn't get a notification of, or it got lost somewhere...
Missing alerts from that interesting discussion yesterday?  Check this stream.

Using the Notification circle

When you create a brand new circle for those profiles and pages that you'd like to receive notifications from, sometimes it happens that you don't see any posts in that stream. In that case just share a post to that circle, don't notify. This should "unblock" the stream.

You may receive emails and / or notifications from this circle. If you wish to opt out of the emails, just go to your account and uncheck the email box, see image at the end of this post.

How to control your notifications

If you don't wish the whole world to notify you or your page, you may modify the settings:  Of course for a business Page to limit the interaction may not be a wise move.

Please don't spam!  Sharing and Notifying

Now here’s a hot potato of a subject! When you share something, please don’t notify anyone unless you know them personally and are sure that they don’t mind.
Constantly notifying people about your posts is spamming: The people who are interested can place you in a circle and subscribe to your posts.

How to do it: When sharing a post, you check the box with "Send also email to...". The people in those circles you have tagged in the posts' share box get a notification in the little red box and an email about it. It's basically the same thing that happens if you individually +-mention someone, but to a larger audience.

When you have 100 or more profiles / Pages in the circle or circles you "Send email to", they only get the red box notification, not the email.

People who are not on  Google+ but you have them in your circles as an email -address always get the email.


Posting to Public and Notifying only certain people or circles:

Share a post to Public, add only those circles you'd like to notify, tick the box and that's it! :-)
Now you have a post that anyone can see + you have notified only the persons and / or the circles you wanted. You can also share a post like this with yourself: If you have created an empty circle for "Bookmarks", you can add that circle to the share box and will see the post any time in that circles' stream.


Remember however, if you notify users about things that:

1) aren't all that relevant or interesting to them
2) are seemingly every post you write
3) are about whatever, but they aren't following you back
4) are your family etc photos (same goes for tagging people!)

- Could I kindly suggest that you are actually spamming them, and you are heading for a blocking. You might ask who in your circles would like to receive notifications of your posts when on certain topic.

Think twice before notifying anyone, please.

Spam example, shared with my Finnish page

Also the +mention of a name sends out a notification to the red box: I've had to limit the ability to notify  to my circles only on my personal profile.  I used to get so much spam, also being tagged in weird NSFW photos or family albums is not my idea of nice interaction.

For Pages, limiting the engagement is problematic:

People ask privately questions about the use of Google+  from my +Google+ Helper Page all the time.  I have only circled a limited amount of people and pages relevant to the content of the Page, to receive more information.  I post everything in Public.

Thus if I limit the access to the circles only, people cannot share private messages with the Page anymore and I cannot help them because I'm not seeing the notifications.  

The spammers are responsible if this happens.  Out of 50 notifications to the page nearly half is just rubbish...  It takes time to sort out them all and as a volunteer helper it fairly makes me mad sometimes!

Don't share stuff with pages or people you don't know, please!  Just share in Public.

Posting is different from notifying

Posting Publicly or to extended circles does not push your posts to anyone's notifications, but (depending on their settings) notifying & emailing does.

Ticking that box pushes your post to all in the circles you include, but only those who have open settings, i.e. who allow anyone to connect with them (like Pages) receive them. The majority of the users allow 'circles only' to connect with them so your notification does not reach those profiles.
Here allowing contact from 'Circles only' in the receiving end means those profiles that the receiver has in their circles.

However, most of the business Pages allow anyone to connect with them because people ask questions and popular pages like this one cannot circle everyone back due to the limits of Google+. This makes Pages vulnerable to these spammy notifications!

The point here is:
If you notify 'Your circles' that might be close on 5000 total strangers...
That is spamming unless those people have said that yes, I'd like to get notifications about this or that topic, or if you are in one another's circles and you notify only very rarely and about posts you think might interest these people.

Besides, now we have a chance to 'subscribe' to anyone's posts by placing them in one circle and sliding the slider all the way to the right: Then we are notified of all their posts and won't miss a thing.

To cap it all

Just don't click on the 'Send also email to...' and you'll be fine, if you share to (Extended circles or) Circles there is no email/notification without ticking the box. When sharing to Public you don't need to add any other circles in the share, unless you especially want to send email & notify that circle.

When you +mention someone in a post or comment, there is a notification to that profile / Page. If their settings allow it.
This is why I keep my settings open on my Pages, so that I can help when called! :-)

How to stop receiving emails

I have opted out of all the email notifications because using the checking system I described on top helps me to see all the messages I receive.  You may uncheck all the boxes or just some.

Links

You can update your Google+ settings here

Change you profile's email contact settings, see this post

More about 'Who sees your post'

Is there something you'd like to add? Have you had problems with spamming?