Make Announcements

Announcements allow system administrators to send messages to users. The messages may be sent to individual users, to members of a particular project, or system-wide. Announcements are displayed in a modal dialog in the web interface and may be acknowledged by users so that they are no longer displayed. They are displayed at most once every 24 hours per session. The default expiration time for an announcement is 7 days. To provide flexibility, announcement text is parsed as markdown.

In this tutorial, we will create an announcement first scoped to an individual user for testing purposes, then system-wide. To complete this tutorial, you must have already installed Tator and have an admin account.

To begin, navigate to the root directory of the Tator source tree under the account used to install Tator. Create a file called `announce.md` and copy in the contents of the announcement, for example:

## My test announcement

* Important thing 1.
* Important thing 2.

For more info go to [tator.io](https://www.tator.io/docs).

To create the announcement from this file, we will use a make target. It is a good idea to test announcements by first only scoping them to your administrative account. This can be accomplished by passing the USER_ID argument. If you do not know your user ID you can see it by visiting /rest/User/GetCurrent while logged into your deployment. The make command below will create the announcement for the specified user only:

make announce FILE=announce.md USER_ID=42

Once you have created the announcement for yourself, log out of Tator and log back in. You should see the announcement displayed.

Click the Don't show again button. This will remove the announcement for the current user so it is never shown again. Now that the announcement looks good, we can create the announcement system-wide:

make announce FILE=announce.md

Announcements can also be scoped to members of a particular project:

make announce FILE=announce.md PROJECT_ID=1