Sims 4 Gallery is Broken
The Sims 4 stopped booting up connected to the gallery a couple months ago. Before the issue started, the gallery functioned as usual. I would open the game, see gallery notifications, open the gallery and use it as normal. But now the Popular Now tab doesn't load and the gallery never connects automatically, I always get the pop up saying the gallery is offline and that connection is required, even though EA Desktop is online and my PC is connected to the internet. I tried reparing the game through EA desktop, disabling my antivirus, running the game as administrator, flushing the DNS cache, none of those worked. I don't think it's caused by my internet, but I don't see any answers about this specific problem.
I've noticed some Gallery issues as well. The "popular now" option doesn't work for me and brings back "No results found", regardless if I launch the game from Origin or the EA app. In my game, the news feed notifications are persisting from one session to the next. However, since the change from the October update, I've been seeing inconsistent notifications from people I follow. Mostly I only see notifications about my shares and Maxis favorites. Just now, I noticed some older notifications, from a handful of people I follow, that popped up in the feed but weren't there during the previous session.
I realize the intent of the change was to optimize the Gallery for the anticipated influx of new users, paired with an already large base, though it seems like there should be a better option. Perhaps the Gallery servers could be given a boost to handle more users? Not only has the change seemingly affected notifications, but it also has rendered the Online Notifications feature pretty much useless, since those notifications only get pushed when you're connected to the Gallery and that connection is severed after a short period of time.
@LADYMarmelade24 I found a thread from 2020, with posts as recent as two weeks ago, that seems to match your issue of notifications disappearing.
The Accepted Solution by @simvasion says "try going to your game folder in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4 and deleting a file called notify.glob. It will regenerate a new one the next time you load the game" Some users reported this worked for them and others said it didn't work. If this does look like the same issue, please click "me too" on the first post and perhaps you could try simvasion's suggestion for your game.
