Platform & access
Notification preferences
The switches at /settings/notifications, which three of them a sender actually reads, and which are stored but currently have no effect on anything.
Platform & access guide for day and boarding schools.
Last updated August 29, 2026
Each person manages their own notification switches at /settings/notifications, and they are stored as JSON on that user record rather than as a school-wide policy. The page is honest about what it saves and less honest about what it does, so this article separates the two. If you are answering a parent who says an option did not work, the table below is usually the answer.
Which channels an event may use - in-app, email, SMS - is decided by a registry in the application code, not by a setting. Some events are marked mandatory there, which is the mechanism a school would use to make an absence alert unsuppressable. Neither the registry nor the mandatory flag is editable from a screen.
What each switch actually does
| Preference | Read by a sender? | Effect today |
|---|---|---|
| generalNotices | Yes | Turning it off suppresses both the in-app and email copy of a published notice |
| emailNotifications | Yes | Turning it off suppresses the notice email; the in-app notification still appears |
| smsNotifications | Yes, but nothing is sent | Gates a stub for high and urgent notices that counts recipients and writes a line to the server log |
| feeDueReminders and feeDueReminderDays | No | Saved and validated; no fee job consults them |
| attendanceAlerts | No | Saved; absence alerts are not filtered by it |
| gradePublished | No | Saved; result publication does not consult it |
| leaveStatus | No | Saved; leave decisions do not consult it |
| digestMode | No | Saved; nothing batches messages into a daily or weekly digest |
Common questions
Quick answers in plain language.
I turned off fee reminders but they keep arriving. Why?+
Because feeDueReminders and feeDueReminderDays are saved to your user record and no sender reads them. Fee reminders are driven by the daily job and the event registry in code, not by that switch. Until it is wired up, treat it as a preference you have expressed rather than a control you have applied.
Which preferences do change what I receive?+
Three, and only when a notice is published: generalNotices suppresses both copies, emailNotifications suppresses the email while leaving the in-app notification, and smsNotifications gates a stub that counts recipients and writes to the server log without sending anything.
Can an administrator set notification defaults for the whole school?+
No. Preferences are per user, saved on the user record through POST /api/settings/notification-preferences. Which channels each event uses is fixed in the notification event registry in code, so changing it is a code change rather than a setting.
Does the daily digest option work?+
No. digestMode saves instant, daily, or weekly, and nothing batches messages on that basis. Every message that is sent is sent immediately.
Related searches
School leaders and IT teams often search for: fee reminder emails schools, and attendance alert parents.