Docs → Advanced Features → Announcements and communication
📢 Announcements and communication
Send one announcement to four different places at once, understand what the game will and will not accept, and set up announcements that write themselves.
You need the clan to know something, and you know perfectly well that half of them will never open the portal. Clan Management → Announcements exists for exactly that: one announcement, delivered to as many as four different places, each with its own wording.
The dashboard
Five counts across the top: Drafts, Scheduled, Failed, Pending Ack. and Auto Announcements. The list underneath can be narrowed with the tabs — All, Drafts, Scheduled, Sent, Failed, Pending Ack. — and with filters for status, priority, where it was sent, whether confirmation was required, and a title search.
Two ways in: the ⚡ Quick Compose box, where typing a title and pressing Compose → opens the editor with it filled in, or + New Announcement.
Deleted announcements are not gone. Switch the Deleted filter to Show and use Restore.
The four channels
| Channel | Where it lands | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Portal | Inside the portal, for every member. | The only channel that accepts emoji and line breaks freely, and the only one that can ask for a confirmation. On by default. |
| Ingame Announcement | The game's own clan announcement. | Hard limit of 900 characters. One per hour, sent while the portal is signed in, highest priority first. |
| Ingame Chat | One of your clan's in-game chat groups. | You must pick the group. Only groups the portal can actually post in appear in the list. |
| Direct Message | A private in-game message to each player individually. | Sent slowly on purpose — a whole clan can take an hour or more. The only channel where per-player placeholders work. |
The Direct Message channel is also the only one with an audience control. Send to offers Everyone in the clan, Chosen ranks, or Players behind target — that last one works out at send time who is currently short of their crypt cycle target.
Writing one
A Title — members see it as the heading, and anything past 100 characters is cut. Optionally say what it is About (general, an event, a crypt cycle, a CP run, rewards) and pick Which one. That attachment is what makes the placeholders resolve to real names and dates.
Switch on each channel you want and write its text. At least one channel is required. Under each box is a row of placeholders you can click to insert at the cursor.
Preview shows the finished text per channel with placeholders filled in — using the real attached record when there is one, so what you read is what members will read.
Save Draft keeps it, Send Now starts delivery. A queued announcement can still be cancelled; anything already delivered is not affected.
What the game refuses
The three in-game channels take plain text only. Web addresses, email addresses and emoji are all rejected by the game — so the portal refuses to send them and tells you which one it found, rather than letting the message vanish silently. The portal channel has none of these restrictions.
Scheduling, priority and expiry
- Send later reveals Send at. Times are UTC, and the queue is checked every minute.
- Priority — Low, Normal, High, Urgent. It affects only the order of the in-game announcement queue. It does not make a portal post more prominent.
- Hide after is optional and removes the announcement from the portal at that time. It does not unsend anything already delivered in game.
- Require acknowledgement is a portal-only setting. Afterwards the detail panel shows the count, the percentage, and a Show who button listing the members who have not confirmed.
Placeholders
Placeholders are written in curly brackets and filled in as the announcement sends. Every channel gets the general ones — {clan_name}, {clan_initials}, {date}, {time} — plus a set that depends on what the announcement is about: event names, dates, minimum points per Guardsmen level and grace period for an event; cycle number, dates and minimum for a cycle; and so on.
{player_name}, {player_rank}, {player_points}, {player_target}, {player_deficit}, {invite_code} and the level tokens are rewritten once per recipient. The other three channels send one text to everybody, so there is nobody to resolve against — the placeholder would appear on screen exactly as you typed it. That is why the portal only offers them under the Direct Message box.Announcements that send themselves
+ New Auto Announcement creates a rule that writes and sends an announcement when something happens, and keeps doing so until you switch it off. Each one has a Name only you see, a Title Template members do see, an Active switch, and the same four channels and placeholders as a manual announcement.
Rules are grouped by category, and the category decides which triggers are offered:
| Category | Examples of what can set it off |
|---|---|
| 🎯 Event | Created · starting in X hours · ending · grace period ending · closed with results · re-opened · a player failed · a player met their target · a penalty was applied |
| 🏰 Crypt Cycle | Started · reminder X hours before the end · warn players who are behind · warn players at risk · closed · re-opened |
| ⚔️ CP Run | Opened · reminder before it starts · CP data not entered before the deadline · closed |
| 🏆 Rewards | A reward distribution has been handed out |
| 👋 Welcome / Leave | A player joined · a follow-up X hours after joining · a player left |
| 🪖 Troops & Player Data | A weekly check against troop-level thresholds you set, on the days you choose |
| 📅 Weekday · 📆 Day of Month | A chosen day, at a chosen time in UTC |
| 📢 General · 💾 Saved Messages | No trigger — you send these yourself |
Several triggers pick their own audience. A "player failed" or "behind target" rule sends a direct message to exactly the players that describes, worked out at send time — you never choose the recipients yourself.
Saved messages
A rule with no trigger is nothing more than a message you keep. It shows in the panel as No trigger — you send this one yourself, and it appears in the compose editor under Start from template, which copies its text and settings into a new announcement that you can then change freely.
When something fails
An announcement's state is the sum of its channels: Sent when everything went, Partially Failed when one channel failed and the rest arrived, Failed when none did. Opening it shows Delivery Status — per platform, with every channel listed — including the ones you never selected, so you can see what was not even attempted.
A failed channel gets its own Retry button. Retrying a channel that did not fail is refused, so you cannot double-send by mistake.
Chat groups themselves — who may read them and who may post — are set up under Clan Management → In-game Chat Groups.
Common questions
I ticked all four channels but only the portal one arrived. What went wrong?
Almost certainly that the other three boxes were empty. Each channel has its own message text — switching a channel on does not copy what you typed elsewhere.
Open the announcement and look at Delivery Status — per platform. It lists every channel and says what happened to each one.
My in-game announcement still says it is waiting. How long does it take?
In-game announcements go out at most one per hour, and only while the portal is signed in to the game as your clan's chest grabber account. Urgent ones jump ahead of low-priority ones in that queue.
To see exactly what is waiting and in what order — and to move something to the front or cancel it — open Clan Management → Messages & Rate limiting. The in-game announcement queue is listed there under The queues.
Where did the Announcement Templates page go?
The menu may still list Clan Management → Announcement Templates, but there is no page behind that entry any more — templates are part of the announcements page now. What used to be a template is an Auto Announcement with no trigger, filed under the 💾 Saved Messages category — create one with + New Auto Announcement and leave the trigger empty.
To use one, open the compose editor and pick it under Start from template. It copies the text and the channel settings into a new announcement, and you can change everything afterwards.
Can I see who has actually read an announcement?
Only if you asked. Switch on Require acknowledgement in the portal section before sending; afterwards the announcement shows how many have confirmed, as a count and a percentage, with a Show who button that lists the members who have not.
It is a portal-only feature. There is no way to tell whether an in-game announcement, chat message or direct message was read.
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