Announced or quiet
Every Area of Interest is either announced or quiet, and you choose per Area. It is one checkbox — Quiet area — and it is the single setting in the editor with the biggest effect on how your venue feels to use.
What each one does
| Situation | Announced (the default) | Quiet |
|---|---|---|
| Somebody arrives there | Everybody in their Group gets a notification naming the Area | Nobody is notified |
| The map and the Friends list | Show them there | Show them there, identically |
So quiet does not hide the Area or the people in it. The editor’s own hint says exactly what it does: entries update presence without notifying group members. The Area is drawn, its name is used, people are described as being in it — the only thing withheld is the interruption.
Which to choose
Announce the places somebody would want to be told about. Where a person arriving is news: a stage, a meeting spot, the entrance, the bar you agreed to gather at.
Make quiet everything a person passes through. Paths, gates, thoroughfares, the area covering half the site, and anything adjacent to somewhere people sit — the edges of an Area are fuzzy enough that somebody sitting near a boundary can drift across it repeatedly.
The rule of thumb: if a person could plausibly trigger it twice in a minute, make it quiet. A venue that notifies on everything trains its visitors to switch Area Alerts off, and then they miss the arrival that mattered.
How this looks from the visitor’s side
They cannot see the setting. There is nothing on the phone that says an Area is quiet, so from the outside it looks like notifications working sometimes and not others.
That is why this is a support-load setting for you rather than for them: a quiet Area is reason five of the six a visitor is told when they ask why no notification arrived, and the page has to say that only the map’s creator can change it. Make the choice deliberately, because the person who fields the confusion is you.
What it does not control
- Departures. Nobody is ever notified when somebody leaves an Area, announced or not. That is a product-wide decision rather than a setting — arrivals, but not departures.
- Whether the label is drawn. That is a separate checkbox: labels: always, or only on demand.
- Floor changes. Moving between floors of an Area is announced under the same category as arrivals, and the same quiet setting applies.
- Whether the visitor gets it at all. Every visitor can switch the whole category off on their own phone. Announced means offered, not delivered.
A worked example
A festival site with eleven Areas.
- Announced: Main Stage, Second Stage, the Beer Garden, the Entrance, the Info Point. Five places where she’s arrived is worth a notification.
- Quiet: the two paths, the campsite as a whole, the food court’s outer boundary, the car park, the toilets. Six places people cross, sit at the edge of, or would rather not be announced at.
The result is a venue where a notification means something. Announcing all eleven would produce roughly forty notifications per person per day, and every one of them would have turned the category off by lunchtime.