by Sharon Strauss.
FYI: I figured out what happened with my attempts to disable pop-up nofications. There are two places to do this. I had disabled pop-up only for assignments last month via Site administration -> Plugins -> Message_outputs->Default_message_outputs
Yesterday I disabled all popup notifications via Site_administration ->Plugins->Message_outputs->Manage_message_outputspop-up_notificationsOFF
So at this that part of the puzzle makes sense.