Improved Activity Messages and Search Range Settings

Today's update won't be as big as the last few major releases we've had, but we hope you'll still enjoy these quality-of-life improvements to help better manage your reminders and activity messages.

Activity Messages

I'll be honest, one of our settings has always bugged me: "Notify on creation of new calendar event". With this enabled, as soon as an event came into the fixed 30-day search range we would send a notification. To me, the setting was a misnomer since that event wasn't really "created", but may have already existed. This was especially annoying when setting up a new notifier since any existing event in that range would be seen as new and trigger a notification.

Thanks to some recent improvements behind the scenes, we were able to re-think how events are processed and we can now distinguish between a newly created and newly detected event. This means that "Notify on create" now means exactly what it says: you'll get a notification if an event was created inside of your configured search range!

Notify on creation Setting

However, we also know that some folks may have been relying on how events were previously handled, and we want to always avoid changing what happens on your server without your knowledge and acceptance. So, we've added a new Activity Messages setting, "Notify on calendar event enter the detection range". This option works exactly how the old "Notify on create" setting used to function, notifying you as soon as we first see an event.

Notify on detection Setting

For anyone who previously had the "Notify on create" option enabled, we're automatically enabling the new setting so your notifier will act the same as it did before this update. However, you can now edit your existing notifier and disable the old setting if you no longer want to be notified when an event is first seen by the notifier.

We hope this new handling of events will help make it easier to set up notifiers exactly the way you and your community want them to work!

Custom Reminders Search Range

Up until now, we've always searched 30 days into the future to find events for Reminders and Activity Message notifications. We've wanted to increase this range for servers with a premium subscription but were always worried about the impact that would have when combined with the old "Notify on create" handling. Now that we've improved the Activity Messages, we're able to open up the search range as a configurable setting!

Number of Days to Search Setting

For all servers, you can now configure the search range for events between 1 and 30 days. For premium licensed servers, you can increase the range up to 90 days. This search range is now in line with the range for Summaries, so you can now have your notifications and summaries cover the same time period.

We hope you enjoy these updates and as always, if you have any questions or feedback feel free to reach out to us on Discord, Mastodon, or Twitter.