Broadcasting announcements to every user

Who can broadcast

Broadcasting is not a permission you grant in Role Management. It is reserved for super-admins, users whose email is on the deployment's super-admin list. That list is set at deploy time, so adding or removing a super-admin goes through your deployment maintainer, not a setting inside the app.

If your email is not on the list, the broadcast button never appears for you. Everything else here, receiving and dismissing announcements, works for every signed-in user.

Finding the broadcast button

When you are signed in as a super-admin, a small, deliberately subtle megaphone button floats in the bottom-right corner of every page. It stays dimmed until you hover over it (its tooltip reads "Broadcast site announcement").

The button also works as a status light. Neutral and dimmed means nothing is live. A red tint with a small red dot on its corner means an announcement is showing to everyone right now.

1. 1Look to the bottom-right corner of any page for the megaphone button.
2. 2Click it to open the broadcast panel.
3. 3Click it again, click outside the panel, or use the X in the panel header to close it.

Quick Send: the built-in update notice

Clicking the megaphone opens the Broadcast Announcement panel, subtitled "Shown to all signed-in users." It loads the announcement that is live now, so you always see the current state.

The Quick Send card holds the app's one and only ready-made message: a notice that the app has been updated and asks people to save any open work and reload, with your app's name filled in automatically. That is the whole template library. There is no way to create, edit, or save more templates. For anything else, write a custom message.

1. 1Click the floating megaphone button.
2. 2Click Send Update Notice in the Quick Send card.
3. 3Watch the button confirm: "Sending…", then "Sent!" with a checkmark for a few seconds.

Sending a custom message

Expand the Custom message section and the text box focuses automatically. The banner renders your message literally, plain text only, with no HTML, markdown, links, or rich-text formatting. Any tags or markdown you type are shown to users exactly as written.

There is no enforced length limit, but the banner displays as a single wrapping line, so keep it to a sentence or two. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed for you. Empty messages cannot be sent, the Send Custom button stays disabled until you type something. If "Failed to send" appears, wait a moment and try again.

1. 1Click the megaphone, then click Custom message to expand the editor.
2. 2Type your announcement, and drag the box's bottom edge if you need more room.
3. 3Click Send Custom, or press Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac) right from the text box.

What recipients see

Every signed-in user, across all roles and all pages, sees a red banner across the full width of the page, directly under the header, with a megaphone icon, your message, and a dismiss X. It appears in their open tabs instantly over the app's realtime channel, with no reload needed. Signed-out visitors see nothing.

Dismissal is personal and local. When someone clicks the X, the banner goes away only for them, in that tab, and nothing about it is recorded. The app keeps no record of who saw or dismissed a broadcast.

The banner is a live push, not a notice board. It reaches tabs that are open at the moment you send it, and someone who reloads or signs in afterwards will not see it. If the realtime service is briefly unreachable when you send, the message is still saved as active (it shows under CURRENTLY ACTIVE), but open tabs may not display the banner.

Clearing or replacing an announcement

Only one announcement can be live at a time. Sending a new message, Quick Send or custom, automatically replaces the old one, and every open tab switches to the new text immediately.

There is no editing a live announcement. To fix a typo, send a corrected message, which replaces the original everywhere instantly. To take a broadcast down entirely, open the panel and clear it.

1. 1Open the broadcast panel from the megaphone button.
2. 2In the CURRENTLY ACTIVE card, click Clear Announcement (it briefly reads "Clearing…" then "Cleared").
3. 3The banner vanishes from every open tab at once and the floating button returns to its dimmed state.

Limits, and the automatic update notice

Broadcasts deliberately do not schedule, target, or surface history. Messages go out the moment you click send, with no future scheduling. Every broadcast reaches all signed-in users, with no way to pick a role, Branch, region, or person, so for targeted communication use Mass Email from the Members directory toolbar instead. Every broadcast is stored permanently with its message, sender, send time, and clear time, but there is no in-app history view, only someone with database access can review past ones. No delivery or dismissal metrics exist.

Do not confuse the manual banner with the automatic version-update notice. Each open tab checks the running build every few minutes, and when it detects a new build, it shows a floating card at the bottom-center of the screen with fixed wording and a Reload button, visible to anyone with the app open, signed in or not. The two work together. The automatic notice catches users a few minutes after a deploy, while Quick Send lets you warn everyone before or right at the moment of an update, or announce something unrelated to deployments entirely.