Announcements Overview

Announcements are a lightweight, pull-based way to communicate time-sensitive notices (facility closures, maintenance windows, new equipment arrivals) to the people who use your makerspace.

They are deliberately passive: an announcement appears the next time a viewer opens the platform within its active time window. There is no email, SMS, or push delivery — nothing goes into the notification queue. If you need a real notification, use Broadcasts instead.

When to use an announcement vs. a broadcast

Use an announcement when…	Use a broadcast when…
The notice is passive — viewers will see it when they next visit	The notice is time-critical — viewers need it pushed to them now
The audience is the whole makerspace, the whole platform, or anonymous visitors	The audience is a specific role, role group, or filtered cohort
The content is short, plain text, and informational	The content needs templating, variables, or multi-channel delivery
You want a persistent banner / dashboard card during the active window	You want a one-time send-and-forget message

Audiences

Every announcement targets exactly one audience. The audience determines who can see it and who is allowed to create it.

Audience	Visible to	Created by
Public	Anonymous visitors on pre-login pages (login, signup, password reset) and all signed-in users	Platform admins only
Authenticated	All signed-in users across every makerspace	Platform admins only
Makerspace members	Signed-in members of one specific makerspace	Makerspace admins / managers with the Manage Announcements permission

Anonymous visitors only ever see Public announcements. Signed-in members see Public + Authenticated + their own makerspace’s Makerspace-members announcements.

Display surfaces

You pick where an announcement renders:

Surface	Renders as
Banner	A coloured strip at the top of every page in the audience’s surface
Dashboard	A notice card on the member dashboard
Both	The same announcement renders in both surfaces simultaneously (intentional duplication for high-priority notices)

Makerspace-scope announcements are forced to Dashboard by the system to keep makerspace notices from competing with platform-level banners. Platform admins may choose any surface.

Status

Status is computed live from the announcement’s is_active flag plus its starts_at / expires_at time window — there’s no status to set directly. As time moves, an announcement progresses through these states:

Status	Meaning
Scheduled	Active, but starts_at is in the future. Not yet visible to viewers.
Active	Within the time window. Currently visible to viewers.
Expired	expires_at has passed. No longer visible.
Deactivated	Manually taken down by an admin before its natural end.

Deactivated announcements whose end time has not yet passed can be Reactivated to put them back into rotation. Once expires_at is in the past, the announcement lives only in History.

Lifecycle and retention

• No hard delete. Deactivating an announcement removes it from member view but preserves the row for the audit trail. The History tab keeps a permanent record of every announcement ever published, including who created it, who deactivated it, and when.
• Creator identity is snapshotted at write time. If an admin’s name changes, or the admin account is later deleted, History still shows the name and email that were on file the moment the announcement was published.
• Public announcements lag by up to 60 seconds. The anonymous-visitor surface is cached server-side to protect the public endpoint from heavy load. Allow up to a minute for a newly-published Public announcement to appear on the login screen.

What’s next

• Makerspace Admin Guide — create, edit, deactivate, and reactivate announcements for your members; use the History tab to audit past notices.
• Platform Admin Guide — publish platform-wide and public-facing announcements, including the PUBLIC-audience safety acknowledgement.