New Reminders

We've released some improvements to messaging alerts. This includes some more efficient processing in the system's backend for messaging alerts as well as an improved user experience for configuring them. The user interfaces for broadcasts and conditional reminders have been replaced with the newer versions, and there is a new way of viewing scheduled events. Documentation for the new pages can be found here:

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Question: I have a conditional alert which is scheduled to send at 00:01 (midnight), but I don't remember choosing this time. Why is this?

Answer: The old way of configuring conditional messaging alerts allowed you to start an alert on a date stored within a case property and also send "Immediately". It might not have been obvious before, but the behavior in the old reminders framework for this type of configuration was to start the alert on the date from the case property and send at 12:01am, so this is the way the alert has always been behaving. The only difference now is that the user interface makes it much clearer what the actual configuration is. If this wasn't the time you wanted the alert to send, you can just update it to a new time.

Question: I see "Interpret send times using GMT when recipient has no preferred time zone" enabled for some of my existing alerts, but I can't set it for new ones. What is this option?

Answer: The old reminders framework used GMT as the default time zone when interpreting send times if a contact didn't have a preferred time zone, so this is how the alert was always behaving. The new framework will use the project's time zone when interpreting send times if a contact doesn't have a preferred time zone, so this option is only shown for old alerts that started off on the old framework in order to preserve the same behavior as before. If you want the alert to interpret the send times in the project's time zone by default, then you can uncheck this option and any new events scheduled from the alert will use the project's time zone by default instead. If a contact has a preferred time zone, that will still be used over the project's time zone.

Question: My alert is a "Custom Immediate" schedule type but I can't seem to add any events or change the times each event waits. Why is that?

Answer: The "Custom Immediate" schedule type is a custom schedule where the events are defined by waiting a certain number of minutes after the last event. This use case has caused some confusion, especially when used with a repeating schedule, so it's use is discouraged and support for this use case is limited. As a result, you can create new alerts of this type but there are some parts of it that will not be editable. You can still edit the message content that is sent, however. If you need a custom schedule type, consider using the Custom Daily schedule which is a much more robust custom schedule type and allows editing of events.