This information applies only to the Original experience.

Notifications sizing

By default, the system ships with all notifications enabled, which means that every notification that can be created, will be created, for all supported events. Depending on the size of your institution and the ways in which courses are set up at the beginning of the semester, this could lead to very large table sizes and associated degradations in performance.

It is a good idea to turn off notifications that are not needed. To do so, go to both the Course Settings > Default Notification Settings, and Organization Settings > Default Notification Settings page and set these notifications to Always Off for all available distributors.

An alternative is to turn off certain notifications during busy periods. For example, turn off Content Item Available notifications while course templates are being completed as those will most likely be responsible for the bulk of the notification load during that period.

In Blackboard Learn Ultra navigation, Notification Settings is located on the Administrator Panel, under The Ultra Experience is here! module. In Ultra Base Navigation, notifications can't be disabled.

Notification Lifespan

The age of notifications when cleanup occurs can be set by administrators on the General Notification Settings page. 

Notifications periodically deletes notifications that have been around for longer than a certain number of days. The default setting is 120 days, which is approximately the length of a semester. You can control the lifespan of these notifications by updating the Notifications Cleanup interval. Lower this setting to have notifications removed from the system more quickly. To learn more, see Setting Notification Options.

All Due notifications are transformed into Overdue events when their due date has passed. These include Assignment Due, Test Due, Gradable Item Due, and Survey Due. The last function of this task, deleting stale recipient data, executes once per day. Every time the task wakes up, it checks whether its execution time has arrived. If it has, it runs. The execution time is specified by the nautilus.staleDataRemove.executionTime property in the nautilus_config.properties configuration file.

Use this setting with caution. Deleted notifications cannot be retrieved or easily reissued.

Task periodicity

The periodicity of tasks has the following behaviors: 

  • Notifications are transformed from Due to Overdue five minutes after their due date has passed.
  • Reminders are distributed five minutes after the reminder time.
  • Stale-data deletion runs within five minutes of the designated time.