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Watch alerts

A watch alert continuously monitors your sources (RSS, scrapers, cloud drives) and emails you whenever new content mentions a keyword you've defined.

Create an alert

/user/watch-alerts:

  1. Keyword or expression: the text to watch (e.g. NIS2 directive, cybersecurity workforce act).
  2. Scope: personal / org / public, or a combination.
  3. Delivery cadence: immediate / daily / weekly.
  4. Sensitivity (high / medium / low): minimum relevance threshold for a match to trigger an email.

Keywords are encrypted at rest (watch_alert.keyword_enc).

Mechanism

The check_watch_alerts cron (08:00 + 20:00 UTC, user timezone) walks new contents since the previous run, computes a similarity score against active alerts, and triggers a digest email if the threshold is reached.

New articles / docs since last run
  ↓
bge-m3 embedding of content vs keyword embedding
  ↓
Relevance score (cosine similarity)
  ↓
If score ≥ threshold: add to user digest
  ↓
Bulk send at end of cron (1 email per user, max 50 hits)

Management

  • Pause / resume: temporarily disable without losing the config.
  • Modify the keyword or threshold — optional backlog recompute (max once per 24 h).
  • Delete: immediate purge of the alert and its hit history.

Limits

  • Up to 20 active alerts per user (configurable via WATCH_ALERTS_PER_USER).
  • Detection lag: 8 h max (cron runs twice a day). No real-time notifications — this is monitoring for awareness, not paging.
  • In pure sovereign: emails are log-only by default (mailer disabled). Configure an internal MTA to actually receive them (see docs/EMAIL.md in the application repo).

For whom?

  • Competitive intelligence: watch a competitor's name across your article feed.
  • Regulatory watch: get alerted whenever a new directive or text mentions a sensitive topic.
  • Brand monitoring: detect mentions of your organisation.
  • Academic research: new papers on a precise theme (combined with the Zotero connector).