The most common reason people abandon news watching is not poor collection but a stream of notifications. After a week they stop reading them; after two weeks they turn them off. That is why noise protection here is on by default rather than “if you like”, and every suppressed message can be explained.
What an alert is
An alert is a rule of the form “events of this importance — into these channels”. It does not decide what is important (that is the materiality rating’s job); it decides whom to wake up about it and how quickly. The same event can carry several alerts: one to your phone, another to the team’s work chat.
Scope and conditions
Like a rule, an alert has a scope: which monitors, sources and tags it concerns. An empty scope means “everything”. A condition can be added on top — for example, “only events about our direct competitor”. Everything outside the scope and the condition simply never reaches the channels.
Materiality bands
An alert has several bands — one per materiality band, each with its own set of channels and its own mode. This is the most practical way to separate noise from the important:
- Noise and “worth knowing” — into the digest only; they do not arrive as separate messages.
- Material — straight into the team’s work chat.
- Existential — straight to the phone, without waiting for the digest.
A band’s mode sets how to deliver: immediately or into the digest. An event without a materiality rating counts as zero — only the “from zero” band catches it.
Noise protection
Five limiters work from day one — they do not need enabling:
- No more than 3 alerts per hour — when twenty events happen, you get three messages, not twenty.
- A 30-minute pause on repeats — the same change on the same monitor does not arrive twice in a row.
- Identical changes — once per day — for example, an exchange rate that trembles all day.
- Burst waiting — when one value jumps back and forth, the product waits and reports once, not on every step.
- Quiet hours from 23:00 to 08:00 — night messages are not thrown away but deferred and arrive in the morning.
Confirmation by a second source
A lone news item often turns out to be one site’s mistake. So an alert can carry a requirement: do not send the message until several independent sites confirm the news. Until the confirmation is there, the alert waits. When a second site writes about the same thing — the message goes out, and it shows that the confirmation arrived.
When the news gets confirmed even more strongly, you are not woken again: a new reminder arrives only when the count of independent sources has doubled. And when no confirmation came within a week, the message is not sent at all.
The order of checks
The checks run in a strict order, and it is not a formality — the order decides which limiter gets named as the reason: first the repeat pause, then the identical-change protection, then burst waiting, then the rate limit, and last the quiet hours.
The suppression journal
Every unsent message has a record with a reason: “repeat pause”, “quiet hours”, “already reported today”, “hourly message limit exceeded”. Silence is always explainable: when you expected a message and did not get it, the reason is two steps away, not “lost somewhere”.
Digests
A digest is one scheduled roundup instead of a stream of messages. It is what makes news readable: you open one letter in the morning and see everything that happened over the day, arranged by stories, with materiality ratings and links.
- How it differs from an alert: an alert is about one event and speed; a digest is about everything over a period, and order.
- What gets in: events that passed the threshold; deferred night messages land in the morning digest too.
- An empty period stays silent: when nothing important happened in the window, the digest does not arrive — unless you yourself asked for empty ones too.
What to do on overload
- Look at the whole check schedule — understand what is due to happen and when.
- Pause the schedule — a global pause stops the checks without resetting the settings.
- Repeat suppressed deliveries — when a channel was unlocked later, the piled-up messages can be re-queued.
- Turn to the agent — it sees the alerts’ posture and the held-message queue and can release them by hand.
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