Support & communication

Flagpost is built to replace the Discord back-channel: tickets, announcements, presence, and team notes all live in the platform, next to the competition they belong to.

Support tickets

Competitors open tickets (optionally linked to a challenge) and reply in a live thread; staff work a real-time queue.

• For competitors — create a ticket, watch the thread update live, reply. You see your own tickets only.
• For staff (ticket_view, ticket_respond, ticket_assign) — a live queue with assignment and resolution, plus internal notes on each ticket: a private, collaboratively-edited pad visible only to staff holding ticket_view_internal_notes — never to the ticket’s opener.
• Attachments — screenshots attach to ticket messages (up to 5 per ticket, 2.5 MB each). Uploads are content-sniffed as images — the declared filename is never trusted — and served sandboxed, because ticket content is competitor-controlled input. Attachment activity emits ticket.attachment_added / .attachment_deleted.
• The audio cue — the only sound in the platform: a new ticket cues staff; a reply cues whichever side didn’t just post. Everything else is visual-only via the bell.

Ticket events (ticket.created, .assigned, .resolved, .message_posted) are all automation triggers — a webhook rule can mirror the queue into your team chat.

Announcements

Staff with announcement_create publish announcements that land as a live banner and emit announcement.published. Announcements can also be posted by the create_announcement automation action — hint-wave notices and first-blood celebrations without a human typing.

• Severity — info, warning, or critical. Severity drives the banner’s visual treatment, and critical is the one sanctioned override of a user’s announcement mute: it always produces a bell notification, because the operator is saying something the competition can’t afford to miss (browser/sound delivery stays opt-in regardless).
• Audience — the whole competition, or a targeted set of teams or users. Targeting is privacy-correct by construction: recipients outside the audience never receive the broadcast and never see the announcement in their list, while posting staff see their full sent history.
• The banner auto-dismisses after a short dwell, so every announcement also lands as a bell notification per recipient — looking away doesn’t mean missing it.

Scheduled announcements

Since v1.6.0, an organiser with announcement_create can pre-write a post and give it a future publish time instead of sending it now.

• It stays hidden until it fires — a scheduled post is a staff-only draft: invisible to competitors and unnotified, absent from the live feed (and from the reconnect snapshot) whether or not it has fired. When its time arrives it auto-publishes exactly like an immediate post — the same banner, the same bell notification, the same audience.
• Manage the pending ones — scheduled drafts have their own list where you can edit or cancel them before they fire. Editing changes the text, severity, or timing; it does not change the audience — to retarget, cancel the draft and repost it. A cancelled draft never reaches a competitor.
• A past or empty time posts immediately — scheduling is opt-in; leave the time blank (or set one already in the past) and the announcement goes out at once, as before.
• Release is scheduler-driven — a released draft publishes on the platform scheduler’s tick (roughly every 60 seconds), so it lands within about a minute of the set time, not to the second.

Presence

Shared resources show who’s looking: “N others viewing” on a challenge, “a judge is looking at this ticket” on a thread. Presence is ephemeral WebSocket state with a short grace period so a brief reconnect doesn’t flicker the list.

Collaborative notes

Two surfaces use true CRDT (Y.js) co-editing — everyone types at once, conflict-free, with changes syncing live:

• Team scratchpad — every challenge gives the team a shared notes pad, strictly scoped to that team. It’s the team’s own thinking space; other teams (and the platform) never surface it anywhere else.
• Personal scratchpad — a competitor with no team (individual-mode play) gets the same per-challenge pad, private to them alone. It keeps the CRDT transport so a solo player’s own tabs and devices stay in sync.
• Staff ticket notes — the internal notes pad on each ticket.

Notifications

The bell in the top bar collects in-app notifications (ticket activity, automation notify actions) with per-user read state, delivered live over a per-user WebSocket room.

Each user can tune delivery under Profile → Notifications (/profile?tab=notifications): mute the ticket, automation, or announcement categories entirely (critical announcements override the announcement mute — see above), and toggle two delivery hints — browser (OS) notifications and the ticket sound. Email is not a per-user channel; it exists as the send_email automation action driven by rules.