News and Notifications Admin
The new NATS4 News and Notifications Admin lets you send news items, such as updates, to all of your affiliates or notifications to specific affiliates. NATS also uses notifications to send you automatic notifications about any problems that may arise.
News
News items are received by all affiliates, and are displayed under the "News Items" tab. News items are displayed at the top of the Affiliate Overview page, and are labeled as "Announcements."
To create a News Item, go to the News & Notifications Admin, and click the "Add News Item" tab. Here, you will be able to choose when the news item/announcement is displayed by using a freeform time, which will be parsed by PHP's strtotime function. Once you have filled that out, you can enter your news item's subject and body. When finished, click "Create This News Item" to create your announcement.
Notifications
Notifications act like emails in NATS4. You can choose to send notifications to all affiliates, or only to specific affiliates. NATS displays the number of new notifications at the top of every page in the affiliate page under "New Messages." Clicking on the number of new messages/notifications takes affiliates to their list of received and sent notifications, as does going to the "Messages" tab of My Account.
You can send a new notification through the News & Notifications Admin by clicking the "Send Notification" tab. Enter the subject and body of the notification, and choose what affiliate(s) you want to send the notification to-- you can either type in "ALL", or use the "Add" link to add affiliates. There is also a drop-down menu of "Quick Links," where you can choose to send your notification to all affiliates, admins, account reps, or site partners. Finally, you can choose to mark the notification as "severe", which will bold your notification in the affiliate's inbox.
Automatic Notifications
NATS automatically sends notifications to administrators when certain errors occur (for example: failed postbacks and failed logins). You can view your notifications in the Messages tab of your My Account screen or in the Notifications tab of the News & Notifications Admin.
See Also
- strtotime -- PHP's documentation on the function used to parse times in the News & Notifications Admin. Note: NATS's strtotime can take a special "NEVER" argument