Announcements and messages

Admin → Messages holds everything the install says in your voice.

The banner

A line across the top of every page — for a maintenance window, a deprecation date, an incident acknowledgment. Setting and clearing it are audited (the settings filter on Activity). Don’t use it for anything people must read; only those who open Toft see it.

Announcement email

Unlike other notifications, an announcement exists to arrive, so it is recorded per recipient.

1. Write it. The composer estimates the audience, including who will be skipped and why.
2. Test it to yourself.
3. Send. One message per recipient, never one message with many addresses.

Situation	Result
No relay configured	Refused relay_not_configured; stays a draft
Empty audience	Refused empty_audience; stays a draft
Two sends at once	One accepted, the rest refused
Recipient locked	Skipped (locked)
Recipient has no address	Skipped (no_address)
Platform restarts mid-send	Remaining recipients are abandoned, never resumed (no double send)

Each recipient’s row records delivered, failed, skipped or abandoned, and the counts come from those rows.

After sending

• A sent announcement cannot be edited or un-sent (409).
• Copy to a new draft starts a new draft with the same subject, body, link and audience. Nothing is sent until you send that draft, which mails everybody again.
• You can delete it with its recipient rows; the audit entry keeps the subject, audience, time, sender and counts. Deleting while it is still sending is refused (send_in_flight).
• announcement_recipient_retention_days prunes recipient rows, never the counts.

Messages that turn people away

Each should say who to contact — “Ask #it-help for a Toft account”, not “Access denied”.

Setting	Shown when
no_account_message	They authenticated but no provider will create an account
locked_account_message	Their account is locked
pending_activation_message	Their account awaits activation
account_activated_message	Emailed when you activate them
app_locked_message	Default text at a locked app’s URL

The knowledge base

knowledge_base points everyone at one app on this install — your runbook or handbook. It appears at the end of the header and on the Documentation page.

• The label and description are yours; renaming the app changes neither.
• It grants nothing: the link only appears for people who can already open the app.
• Anonymous visitors never see it, even if the app is public.
• Any app can be the knowledge base.