Notifications

What the platform will tell you about, where the record of it lives, and how to stop it from interrupting the machine in the back room.

Why it existsTwo of the three things worth knowing about happen while nobody is looking at the dashboard. A screen goes dark in a shop at eight in the evening. A creative arrives for approval and, until somebody approves it, that slot plays nothing and earns nothing. Neither announces itself in a report you read on Friday.

What you are told about#

A creative is waiting for approval. An advertiser wants to run on your screens. Nothing of theirs plays until you allow it, so this is the one that costs money to leave alone. It takes you to the External ads page.
A screen went dark. It stopped reporting for six minutes. Usually the shop's network, the power, or a television somebody switched off at the wall — rarely the screen itself. The screen is not playing is the list of things to check.
A screen came back. The other half of the story. Off by default: it is good news, and good news at three in the morning is still a telephone lighting up.

Two different things#

The notification centre — the bell above Help Center — is the record. Everything that happened is in it, newest first, for ninety days, whether or not anybody was looking at the time. Opening one takes you to the thing it is about and marks it read; read is per person, so your colleague clearing theirs does not clear yours.

A pop-up on your desk is an interruption, and interruptions belong to a machine rather than to an account. The switches at the bottom of the centre are therefore per device: turning screens off on the laptop in the back office does not turn them off on the one you carry. They change what interrupts you — never what is written down.

Your browser has to allow them

Nothing pops up until the browser is asked, once — the Allow notifications link at the foot of the centre does the asking. If you have already refused, the browser remembers that and the link stops working: the block has to be lifted in the browser's own settings for this site. The centre fills up either way.

By e-mail#

A screen that goes dark is also written to you about, because everything above needs a dashboard to be open somewhere. The message comes once a screen has been silent for more than five minutes, and screens that fall silent together — a shop whose router has failed — arrive as one message with the list, not one each.

Not outside its working hours. A screen with working hours is written about only while it is meant to be on — and one that is still dark a little after opening is.
Not the same screen all day. After a message about a screen it is left alone for six hours, however often it comes and goes.
For each publisher you work in. There is a switch for going dark and one for coming back, for every publisher separately, in Your account. Coming back is off until you switch it on.

Example

A Saturday: at 19:40 a screen at Old Street stops reporting. Nobody is at a desk, so nothing pops up anywhere. On Monday morning the centre shows it went dark at 19:40 and came back at 08:12 — a shop that switches the wall socket off at closing time, which is a conversation to have and not a fault to chase.

The desktop application shows the same notifications without a browser tab open, and grants itself permission — the reason to install it.