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Comment by kemitche | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't even need that. It should start by grouping the options by severity - separate the real alerts from the test alerts via section headers and you solve 99% of the problem.

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My concern with severity groups is you have users and managers deciding which messages go in which severity groups. That ignores the impact of politics and short termism on the decision making process. (e.g. How severe is a missing child?). Before you know it, everything will be in severe, and your users will be asking for a "really, really severe" category.

Makes sense, but I would hope even the most inept manager could recognize that "AMBER Alert" and "Nuclear Annihilation Imminent" are different degrees of severity.

I think kemitche was saying was they would have two groups. One would be "Test Alerts" and the other would be "Real Alerts" not that we needed to have a philosophical break down of alerts by severity. severity may have not been the best word but He did explain his definition in the next few words.

Indeed - something like this [1]. There's scope for further improvements, but this alone would be a vast improvement.

Given the cost of a mis-click, I'd also implement a Github-style confirmation box that can't just be subconciously clicked-through ("To confirm that you wish to send a PACOM Alert, type 'pacom alert'").

[1]: https://twitter.com/iamlucamilan/status/953201356545974272

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