Overview

Users need a way to notify someone who has their status set to Do Not Disturb. The use case to bypass Do Not Disturb is for critical and urgent messages that may need immediate attention.

This matches with our thematic goal and is a feature tailor made for mission critical use cases.

Users should have a predictable way of notifying someone on DND in a Direct Message, Group Message, or even a channel. This can be achieved by relying on the existing Message Priority functionality. Any message marked as Urgent using the message priority feature should always trigger a notification for the user receiving it.

Direct Messages

When typing a message to a user who is in DND, there is already an indicator just above the message input box that informs you that the user has their status set to DND. We can simply add another line to that message that informs you that the Urgent message priority can be used to bypass DND and notify the user receiving the message..

Open

Group Messages

When typing a message in a GM, if any of the users in the GM are in DND, they will not receive a notification. We should inform the user about this as they type their message and also inform that they can use the Urgent message priority to bypass DND and notify them.

Open

Channels

When typing a message in a channel and adding mentions for 1 or more users, if any of the mentioned users are in DND, they will not receive a notification. We can inform the user about with an ephemeral message sent to the user that only they can see. While they won’t have any way to trigger a notification for the message they already sent, they can always send a new message with the Urgent priority and trigger a notification. This will make it clear to the user that the Urgent priority will always trigger a notification irrespective of if the message is sent in a Channel, GM, or DM.

Thread replies

Since thread replies currently do not have the option to add a message priority, there will be no way for the user to trigger notifications for thread replies if the recipient is set to DND.

Note that replies to messages marked as Urgent will also not trigger notifications if a user is set to DND.

Supporting Changes

When you set your status to DND, you currently don’t expect any notifications to pop up. As we introduce this change and the ability to bypass DND, we need to be careful about not leaking information in unwanted scenarios like if the user is in an un-secure environment or if they are sharing their screen.

1. To avoid any information getting leaked unintentionally, anytime the Urgent message priority is used AND the user is set to DND, the notification triggered should NOT contain the actual contents of the message. Instead, the notification alert should just say “You have an urgent notification!” along with where the notification originated from (DM/GM/Channel, Server URL, and Sender).

2. System console configuration — We should add an option in the system console to enable/disable the behaviour of Urgent messages bypassing DND for the entire server. This configuration can live next to the Message priority configuration in the Posts page.
   
   

    

3. [TBD] Inform the user about this behaviour while setting up DND?

Edge cases

While adding the Urgent message priority to a message will help users bypass DND and trigger a notification, there might be other factors that determine if an end user actually receives the notification.

• If the DM, GM, or Channel is muted by the user receiving the message — In this case, the notification will be suppressed even if it has the Urgent priority.

• If the DM, GM, or Channel is configured to Never trigger notifications either in the Channel Preferences, or in the global settings by the receiving user.

• If the user has disabled notifications at a higher level. They can have disable notifications for…

  • The site in their web browser

  • The server in the desktop app

  • The entire browser or desktop app at the operating system level

  • The operating system using DND mode at the OS level

Mobile [TBD]

License

Resources

• PRD

• Figma Design File

• Figma Clickable Prototype

• Jira ticket

See also…

Below are some other related links that are supplemental to this feature:

• Alternate ideas

• Future improvements