I've recently upgraded to KDE 4.5 and have noticed that the notification area works a bit differently. Specifically, notifications remain in the notification area until dismissed, and maybe also until a timeout period has elapsed (not sure of this). This has become somewhat of an annoyance lately, as I use Pidgin with the libnotify plugin, and this causes all notifications of logins/logouts, and any chat messages that appeared while the chat window is not in focus, to sit there in the notification area. Is there a way of keeping certain apps from aggregating messages in the notification area? Something that could perhaps utilize the same window class/role/type/etc. functionality used in other settings panes (such as Window Behavior -> Window Rules)? I didn't find this functionality in the notification area settings, so my guess is that it doesn't presently exist.

It is up to the application to inform the Notifications area of the persistence of the notification. This is a bug in libnotify or Pidgin in this case.

As far as I know, it is not possible to filter out notifications.

This happens to be an issue with all apps though, even KDE apps like powerdevil leave their notifications there for what seems like forever.

Is this a new change for KDE 4.5? I didn't have this problem with KDE 4.4.x. I'm using the same version of Pidgin and libnotify as I was before upgrading to KDE 4.5, too. Nothing appears to have changed, aside from KDE itself.

Most notifications should automatically shrink away... Can you reproduce under a new user?

Well, they do "shrink away", in the sense that they disappear from view. I think I may not have properly described the issue. The notifications do disappear after a few seconds, but the "i" icon in the Notification Area lights up and copies of the messages that have popped up stay there until you click the icon and dismiss them.

archtaku wrote:Well, they do "shrink away", in the sense that they disappear from view. I think I may not have properly described the issue. The notifications do disappear after a few seconds, but the "i" icon in the Notification Area lights up and copies of the messages that have popped up stay there until you click the icon and dismiss them.

That sounds like you're annoyed with how the notification history works. When you used 4.4.x, did you by any chance use the alternative systray: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Sy ... ent=119268 ? In that one, you can turn off the notifications history. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as intended in 4.5 (at least I haven't been able to make it do so).

I don't use Pidgin but depending on what other statuses you may be interested in, it may help to disable the "Application Status" or "Communications" categories in the system-tray settings (just right-click on the systray and select the "System Tray Settings" entry).

No, I've never used the alternative system tray, this is actually the first I have learned of it. I'll try messing with the system tray settings and see if that does what I want.

I have this exact same complaint. I'm running Kubuntu and the k-bar is the default setup. With Kopete, every time someone types a message to me it gets added to the notification area, along with when they send me messages and they never leave the expanded notification area unless I manually dismiss them. It gets really annoying after a while.

KDE 4.5 etc...

I would recommend filing a bug / feature request about this, although PowerDevil notifications are automatically dismissed for me on Trunk ( Although a history of them is kept )