Week 038 — Rewards Complete, Notifications Begin

All three paths through reward allocation — owner finds their own item, anonymous finder, registered finder — work end to end.

Week of August 4, 2025

Progress

Reward allocation on item return was completed Tuesday. The three cases: owner finds their own item (reward returns to their balance, no payout), anonymous finder (temporary user record receives the reward notification), registered finder (points transferred to their account, logged). All three passing.

The new user experience got its first real treatment. When an unsubscribed user lands on the items page, they see the subscription call to action instead of a blank list. Session-based subscription status was wired into the page build logic. New users who complete signup are routed to the subscriptions page rather than the items page — completing the new user funnel that was started months earlier.

The notification system was started. A notifications table was created, and the first pass of NotificationDTO and NotificationRepository classes was built. The notification gets sent when a reward is received — the finder is notified that their reward is on the way.

The Hard Part

A JavaScript type mismatch was causing the new user's post-signup redirect to fail. The session variable for return_url returns JavaScript null when not set — not the string "null". The condition was testing === "null" (string) instead of === null (value). Works now.

Next Week

The notification classes need to connect to the actual notification display. Where do users see their notifications, and how do they know new ones have arrived?