Staying informed

The bell in the top bar (labelled Inbox when you open it, at /app/notifications) is the one place everything lands, whatever else is switched on. Open it and you see two lists, in this order:

1. What is waiting for an answer. Somebody offering you a task, or asking you onto a project. These are pieces of work, not messages, and they carry their own Accept and No thanks buttons right on the row.
2. Everything else. A task landed on you, a mention, review activity, a deadline coming up.

Read notifications stay in the list rather than disappearing, so "what did I miss this week" always has an answer. Each notification is a snapshot of what happened at the time. If a task is renamed later, an old notification still reads the name it had when it was sent.

A couple of things, being put on a project or added to a board, are important enough that they also interrupt you with a popup the moment you open the app. You cannot miss them by never opening the bell.

Kadrenta holds most notifications back for a short while before sending them, so that handing somebody five tasks in a row becomes one message instead of five.

There are three speeds:

• Immediate, for something you are sitting there waiting for, like a share link or a password reset. Nothing is bundled.
• Five minutes, for something that expects an answer soon, like a colleague handing you a task directly.
• Twenty minutes, the ordinary case: a task assigned to you, a mention, review activity.

Two rules govern the bundling. First, the buffer is per person, not per subject. You get one message covering everything, not one per project you happen to be on. Second, a shorter window pulls a waiting bundle forward, never the other way round. If a five-minute item arrives while a twenty-minute bundle is still forming, the whole bundle goes out in five minutes instead. An urgent item is never delayed by something already waiting, and a slow item is always allowed to catch a ride with something more pressing. A subject line never names a specific number of minutes, because a bundle can span more than one window.

By default, everything reaches the bell. Only two kinds of event also go to your mailbox without you changing anything: a task landed on you, and a colleague is waiting for you to accept or decline something they handed you. Both are moments where somebody else is stuck until you act. That is the line Kadrenta draws between news and work. A mention, a review verdict or a deal going quiet is news, and stays in the app only, unless you turn mail on for it yourself.

Outside of notifications entirely, a handful of transactional mails go out no matter what your preferences say, because you have no studio membership yet to hang a preference on: confirming your email address, resetting your password, and being invited to a studio.

Open Profile → Notifications for a grid: one row per kind of thing that can happen, one column per way of reaching you. Tick or untick any cell; it saves as you go. If your studio has connected Discord or Slack, those columns appear too. A studio connecting a channel never announces anything about you without your own say-so. Every column besides the in-app one starts off, and turning one on is something only you do, for yourself.

The Discord DM column only affects people who linked their own Discord account under Profile → Connections.

Rooms, a studio's shared Discord or Slack channel, only carry a short, fixed list of notification kinds: work landing on somebody, deadlines, review activity. Nothing that can carry an amount, a client's name, or free text a studio wrote to one person specifically ever reaches a shared room, and that list is not something a studio can widen.

Your crew hears about things through the bell, and through mail if they have switched it on, as described above. A client never receives any of that. The two systems are entirely separate, on purpose: a client only ever gets something in their inbox when somebody on your side presses a specific, explicit button to send it to them — sharing a review round, naming them in a review comment, or sending a file delivery. There is no notification kind, no default routing rule and no background job that can put a message in front of a client; the only door out to a client is the one you open yourself, each time, by hand.

Because a client can end up on a mailing list this way without ever having created an account, every mail that goes to one carries its own unsubscribe link. A client can stop hearing about one project specifically, or stop hearing from your studio altogether. That choice needs no account and no reply to anybody. It is a page they open from the link itself.