Notifications

People hear about activity three ways: in the app (the bell and /notifications), by email, and by browser push.

Categories

Category	Examples
collabs	Requests to join a project, accepted or declined requests
messages	Unread conversation messages
sales	Release and stem sales, tips
payouts	A withdrawal was paid, failed or was declined

In-app notifications are always on. Email and push can be turned off per category at /account/notifications. Collab requests can be accepted or declined right from /notifications.

Browser push setup

1. Create VAPID keys once. This writes them to .env:

   php artisan webpush:vapid

2. Set VAPID_SUBJECT to a mailto: address or your site URL, and FRONTEND_URL to the app's address. Notification links and icons are built from FRONTEND_URL.

3. Install the gmp PHP extension (or at least bcmath). Push encryption is very slow without it, and the API logs a warning.

Keep the keys once they are live. New keys drop every existing push subscription.

The app registers public/push-sw.js as its service worker when someone turns push on. Push needs HTTPS (or localhost).

Email

Email uses the standard Laravel mail settings in .env and goes through the queue.

Adding a notification

1. Extend App\Notifications\ActivityNotification and set category(), key() (like sales.tip), params() and path().
2. Add its subject, body and action text to config/messages.php under activity::{category}.
3. Send it with $user->notify(...). The base class picks the channels: database always, plus mail and push when the person has them on.

Listeners are registered in EventServiceProvider. Event discovery is off, because it ran each listener twice.