The platform sends two kinds of messages — emails and push notifications — and both run through the same preference matrix. Each user controls which categories they receive, when push gets delivered, and whether the whole channel is muted. This guide walks through what categories exist, how the preferences work, and why a small set of messages bypasses every gate.

Notifications are categorized; each category can be turned off independently. Quiet hours are an opt-in nightly window for push. Critical messages — payments, access, payouts — bypass every gate except full silence.

How the preference matrix works

A user has one settings screen at /dashboard/settings that controls every notification. Each category is a toggle. Turning a category off means messages in that category will not arrive — neither by email nor by push, depending on the channel the category uses.

The matrix layers three controls. The category toggle is the first. Above that sits an account-wide paused flag, which suppresses every non-critical message at once. Above that sits a full_silence flag, which suppresses absolutely everything including critical messages.

In day-to-day use, almost nobody touches full_silence. It exists for users who want to delete their account but keep their entries visible for the rest of the pool — turning every notification off is a halfway-out state before account deletion. paused is the more common dial for a user who wants a quiet week but does not want to lose access to payment confirmations and similar transactional messages.

What the categories actually cover

The "Critical" rows are not toggleable in the usual sense. They will fire regardless of the paused flag and regardless of the category toggle, because they carry information the user genuinely needs to act on. Only full_silence stops them.

Quiet hours

Quiet hours respect the user's local timezone, which is captured during onboarding and stored on the user profile. The window is checked at push-send time, not at event time — a round recap that fires at 23:50 will be deferred and delivered the next morning at the window's open if the user has quiet hours active.

Critical pushes are NOT affected by quiet hours. A payment confirmation or a payout-position notification fires whenever the event happens, on the principle that delaying a transactional message overnight serves nobody. In practice this rarely matters; almost all transactional events happen during business hours.

Push vs email — which channel a category uses

Most categories are email-only. The categories that fire on push are: cut-line push (R2 official, push only), big-move alerts (Eagle-plus only, push only), and the push half of round recaps. Everything else is email. The asymmetry is deliberate — push works best for time-sensitive, single-screen-of-text events; the round recap is the borderline case where some users want both.

A user who turns off the push channel entirely (via the OS-level permission, or by never granting push permission during onboarding) will still receive the email half of any dual-channel category, and will still see the inbox entry for the push half on the in-app notification bell. The inbox is the persistent record; push is the live delivery channel.

The in-app inbox

Independent of email and push, the platform maintains an in-app inbox at /dashboard/notifications with a bell icon on every page. Every notification the platform sends — regardless of category, regardless of whether email or push fired — also writes an inbox row, unless the user has full_silence enabled. The bell shows an unread count; clicking through opens the inbox.

The inbox exists because email is unreliable. If a user's email provider tags a notification as spam, the inbox still shows it. If a push notification was dismissed before being read, the inbox still shows it. The inbox is the platform's authoritative record of what was sent to the user — the email and push channels are convenience layers above it.

A category turned off via the preference matrix does NOT write to the inbox. The inbox respects every gate the email and push channels respect, except for full_silence which suppresses everything. A user who wants to silence email but keep the inbox active needs the paused flag, not category-level off-switches.

Common questions

For where to adjust these settings on your account, visit /dashboard/settings. For how notifications fit the commissioner workflow, read The Commissioner Guide.