Swarm notifications
Hear about mentions, assignments, comments and due dates, and decide how Swarm interrupts you.
What Swarm tells you about
Swarm alerts you when something lands on you:
| Alert | When |
|---|---|
| Mention | Somebody named you in a channel. |
| Direct message | Somebody wrote to you. |
| Thread reply | Somebody replied in a thread you are in. |
| Task assigned | A task was assigned to you. |
| No longer yours | You were taken off a task. |
| Task comment | Somebody commented on a task you watch. |
| Status change | A task you watch moved to another column. |
| Task due | It is due today or overdue. |
| Reminder | The one you scheduled. |
Swarm never alerts you about your own doing: whoever performed the action is excluded from the recipients. The one exception is the reminder, where the person alerting and the person alerted are deliberately the same.
The panel
Open the app rail's bell and go through what came in, in three tabs: all, messages and tasks. On a phone, open it from the user menu.
Mark everything read in one go, without opening the alerts one by one.
Swarm collapses a burst about the same thing into one row: five messages in a row from the same person in the same conversation are one event to a reader, even though they are five alerts. The grouping belongs to the panel; push still fires per message.
On-screen alerts
Decide how Swarm interrupts you while you work from the app rail's cog, under the "Alerts" heading.
- Sound: a tone on each alert.
- Desktop: a system notification. If your browser has blocked them, the menu says so.
- Push: alerts even with the tab closed. On mobile, add Swarm to the home screen before turning them on.
You keep these three settings in this browser and in Swarm, not in your account. Turning them on here does not turn them on in the suite's other apps.
The same menu is where you choose the sidebar's shape (accordion or push navigation), the other preference that only applies here.
Muting per channel
Mute a noisy channel without touching the others: each channel has its own setting, between all messages, mentions only and muted. See Channel members and roles.
Push and the open tab
Swarm sends push to your phone only when it cannot see you on a live tab: that tab already rings, flashes the favicon and shows the alert.
You count as present while the tab is visible. A backgrounded tab does not count.
Set yourself away by hand when you get up from the desk: you show as offline and push does go to your phone.
Whether the push goes out or not, the alert is in the panel and the badge.
Tap the push and Swarm opens what it is about: the task, the message in its channel, the project or the event.