The way notifications are handled currently is fairly inconvient.
Whenever you click the "bell" the counter vanishes and all items are marked as read. Other forum software does not handle it that way.

Instead the counter should decrease whenever you have visited the unread item and dissapear once it has reached 0.

Additionally a "Read all notifications" button within the dropdown would be nice, once these functions have been implemented.

Hello. Notifications don't necessarily contain a link to an item, they can just be informational messages, so when you open the notification list, you are considered to have read it.