How to turn off GitHub’s notification icon
…after you have accidentally enabled it.
I consume notifications from GitHub exclusively via email. For work, and repositories in my employer’s org, I route notifications to my work email, the rest goes to my private email, stashed away by project using filter rules.
Every once in a while I get frustrated by GitHub’s web interface (particularly in Firefox for Android) and install the official GitHub mobile app. After a few minutes, I realize that this will burn me out, and uninstall it. This happens about every other year.
Then I look at GitHub’s web UI again, and realize: There’s a new icon for GitHub notifications!
Turns out that when installing the GitHub mobile app for Android and signing in, it changes a bunch of settings in an attempt to be helpful.
Here’s how to turn all of that off again.
Step 1. Turn off “On GitHub” delivery
Go to github.com/settings/notifications
and, for every category listed (Participating, @mentions,
Watching, Actions, Dependabot),
uncheck the “On GitHub” box.
This stops anything new from being routed into the web inbox. But this is not enough, because the icon only disappears if you have no unread notifications at all.
Step 2. Mark all notifications as read
Go to github.com/notifications and mark everything as read.
Step 3. Sign into your SAML-protected organizations
So the notification icon is still there, with a blue dot, but when you click on it there are no unread items.
This probably means you need to sign into a SAML-protected organization (your employer using Okta… or whatever), and mark the notification inbox as read again.
You need to repeat this process for all such organizations you are a member of. If you have more than one, you are very special, but also, I don’t envy you.