In March, we launched Experience Notifications, a new way to re-engage your 13+ users and keep them up to date on the most important moments in your experiences through personalized notifications.
We are excited to share that you can now mention users in your notifications. This feature allows you to set up triggers to notify a user when their friend takes a relevant action in your experience. This way, the next time a friend gifts another friend an item, beats their high score, or attacks their base, your users won’t miss out.
How Users Receive Notifications
In order for a user to receive an Experience Notification that mentions a user, the recipient must be opted into notifications for your experience and the recipient must be friends with the mentioned user.
Users can opt-out of being mentioned in their friends’ Experience Notifications in their privacy settings by adjusting the “Update friends about my activity?” setting (under Settings > Privacy > Other Settings). Only 13+ users can be mentioned in their friends’ Experience Notifications.
Adding Mentions to Experience Notifications
To enable Experience Notifications, read our Lua and OpenCloud creator guides, which have now been updated with examples of user mentions.
Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions. Thank you!
Because, last when I’ve seen it talked about to not mention users that aren’t the actual user. Or anything that isn’t relevant to the notification.
Now you can essentially notify players of ongoing events, if they’ve been knocked off the top-3-best player list or if a new round for a game is about to start.
Yes, now that we have the ability for users to control their activity visibility to others, we introduced this new capability. The recipient and user being mentioned must be friends with each other in order for that user to be referenced in the notification body. Hope this helps!
This is less than ideal for many use-cases, in my experience I use notifications to alert players of when another user has sent them an urgent message; as the name implies, the message is urgent so the notification needs to be sent regardless of if the sending player (which in this case is the player being mentioned) has their activity set to “No”. On top of this, the sending user may not necessarily be friended to the user they are messaging.
In both cases, I have consent from both the sending user and the receiving user (the sending user intentionally sent the “important message” while the recipient turned on and kept on notifications knowing the fact that they could get notifications like this.). I would love to implement this feature into my experiences but given the current restrictions, I simply cannot do so.
Would love an answer to why Notifications are only 13+
We’re using notifications quite a lot across our games and the biggest issue we are seeing is players not opting in or Roblox just isn’t sending the notifications.
Right now we have a rather conservative limit of receiving only one notification per 3 days per experience. We are exploring ways to allow more notifications through without such stringent one-size-fits-all limits, so stay tuned.
Hey Outlook, glad to hear that you’re using notifs across your experiences! Update notifications that you send from Creator Hub go out to users of all ages. Notifications triggered by the API are currently limited to 13+ users because they can be personalized and targeted to each recipient. We need to be extra safe with personalized or targeted messages to under-13 users. The same goes for referencing their identity in notifications.
I don’t think it’s super niche at all, infact I tihnk it’s a huge opening of notifications use-cases. A friend wants to trade you an item in-game for example.
I think the issue with it’s usefullness is that you can only send one notification to a user per 3 days. What’s the point of linking them to these actions if more than likely the user won’t get the notifications that matter, when they matter, because rate limiting?
To start, Experience Notifications are subject to the same static throttle limit of experience update notifications. Each user can receive one notification every three days from a given experience and you’ll receive transparent feedback when a user’s throttle limit is reached. The limit will be relaxed over time.
I sadly don’t see much purpose or use for this feature with such strict limitations for an opt-in notification feed.
You do have a point, but I still believe it’s still a little niche, solely because I haven’t seen many developers take advantage of it. While it broadens use-cases for the notification system, I can’t think of anyway where it’d benefit me personally, at least yet. Plus, I don’t think it wouldn’t be the first feature that would first come to mind when you’re asked what is something you really want in development.
However this doesn’t mean it’s a bad update, I just think there’s a few other ways to add to it!
I’m not entirely sure if this would be a good idea in the long run, but I was thinking that individual experiences could have different levels of notification permissions. The default level would heavily rate limit notifications from a given experience, where as full notifications would either give all notifications or a more relaxed limit on notifications. There’s probably a number of ways to implement this, perhaps even API for different levels of urgency (high or low priority).
For example, some experiences might just have a daily reminder that something is ready for you. But some other experiences may have an alert that you’re being raided, and perhaps as a player, you’d want these notifications to appear for you every single time (or at least as frequently as possible). This would be another reason to have priority API. Alternatively, a setting to simply choose the amount of notifications per day or per week for an individual experience could be another option, but I like YouTube’s notification approach.
I think this is a great feature, but I can’t think of many reasons that I’d use it for if only one notification can be seen every three days. Hopefully this will be increased to at least once a day if priority/frequency systems aren’t something that would be implemented.
No the limits for game updates and notif API requests are separate. Also, the good news is, as promised, we reduced the rate limit for API requests down to once a day (previously once every 3 days) so you can reach your users with notifs a lot more often
