🐛 announcements: Scheduled announcements are visible to all users

[marianomoura]

Workspace

announcements

📜 Description

Currently, the announcements plugin system lacks proper visibility controls for scheduled announcements. All users can view planned announcements regardless of their scheduled publication date or user permissions.

👍 Expected behavior

Access to scheduled announcements should be restricted to users and groups with appropriate permissions.

👎 Actual Behavior with Screenshots

All users can currently view planned announcements. This cannot be controlled through the permission plugin because the announcements view has no permission layer - it directly queries and returns all database records.

👟 Reproduction steps

1. Log in as a user with announcement creation permissions.
2. Create two announcements: one for today and another scheduled for the future.
3. Log out and log in as a user without announcement permissions. Note that the future-scheduled announcement remains visible and displays its scheduled time.

📃 Provide the context for the Bug.

I need scheduled announcements to be hidden from users until their publication date. Currently, all users can see announcements I'm preparing, regardless of their scheduled time.

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this bug has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

🏢 Have you read the Code of Conduct?

• I have read the Code of Conduct

Are you willing to submit PR?

No, I don't have time to work on this right now

[Harsh-007-max]

Hey is anyone working on this Issue?
If not I can help with it

[gaelgoth]

Hi @marianomoura, @Harsh-007-max

I’d consider this more of a feature request. If I understand correctly, you want to limit scheduled announcements to a specific group of people?

For this implementation, we have two possible paths:

• Add a new permission specifically for scheduled announcements
• If the goal is simply to hide announcements until the scheduled start_at date, we could implement an
  automatic switch that moves the announcement from inactive to active at the right time

What are you toughs on this @kurtaking ?

[chicobento]

@gaelgoth , future announcements can be seen both in the card, /announcements page and also in the banner.

If the announcement is always visible regardless of the start date, what is the point of having the start date field ? From this angle, it looks like a bug, but perhaps Im misinterpreting the feature.

[gaelgoth]

Hi @chicobento, the start_at date was originally thought to control the announcement display order. Previously, ordering was based only on created_at, which didn’t allow changing the announcement order.

That said, I understand the need 😄, @Harsh-007-max, do you have a plan for improving this?

[chicobento]

@gaelgoth , tks for the clarification. now, what's the behavior of the active field ? I see that 'inactive' announcements are also seen on page and card. Is it being filtered somewhere ?

[Harsh-007-max]

Hi @chicobento, the start_at date was originally thought to control the announcement display order. Previously, ordering was based only on created_at, which didn’t allow changing the announcement order.

That said, I understand the need 😄, @Harsh-007-max, do you have a plan for improving this?

My proposed solution would be:
As you have said here "Access to scheduled announcements should be restricted to users and groups with appropriate permissions."
that means we are using some kind of group's to actually identify a bunch of users with the same access it can be owner's group or user's group
so is there a existing implementation in the system for this grouping? ( I am new to this codebase)
so if we are using group's and sending scheduled announcement then we can just use the start_at field to query the announcement data and show them and use groupIds to show the announcement to that particular groups

[kurtaking]

What are you toughs on this @kurtaking ?

I think we are in a bad spot where using start_date has misled people to believe we support scheduling announcements to post at a later date which I do not believe was the original intent behind the contribution. It was meant more along the lines of being an indicator such as maintenance scheduled in 2 weeks, systems will be offline.

We should take some feedback on the verbiage being used and how we can improve that.

As far as scheduled announcements, I think a nice direction would be to have a status associated with an announcement beyond active/inactive. Something where values could be active | inactive | scheduled (... | draft | archived, etc) that represent the state of the announcement.

It might be worth putting effort there rather than some logic that contains a bunch of conditionals to do things based on different props?

I see that 'inactive' announcements are also seen on page and card. Is it being filtered somewhere ?

@chicobento, We need to filter out announcements that are inactive. If that isn't happening for you, that's a bug.