Quiet hours and busy users

A message that pops up in the middle of someone's sales demo, or at 7 AM on a Saturday, teaches people to click it away unread. Pardon has two ways to choose its moment: it holds back while someone is presenting, and it can respect quiet hours you set.

Neither applies to a reboot campaign's final countdown, which always shows on time (see Reboot campaigns).

Someone is presenting

When a user is in a full-screen app or game, or in Windows presentation mode, respect_focus decides what happens. (Windows' Do Not Disturb setting on its own doesn't count.)

Each signed-in user is checked separately, so one person presenting doesn't hold the message back from everyone else on a shared machine.

Quiet hours

Quiet hours are a window, in each machine's own local time, when this campaign shouldn't appear:

"quiet_hours": { "start": "18:00", "end": "08:00", "days": ["mon", "tue", "wed", "thu", "fri"], "action": "wait" }

• start and end are 24-hour HH:MM. If end is earlier than start, the window runs past midnight, like the example: 6 PM to 8 AM.
• days lists the days the window starts on, so the example covers weekday evenings through to the next morning. Leave it out to mean every day.
• action is "skip" (show nothing: suppressed, exit 7, suppressed_reason: "quiet_hours") or "wait" (hold until the window ends, then show).
• The window follows the wall clock, so it moves with daylight saving time.

Quiet hours apply to the whole machine and are checked once, before Pardon shows anything to any user. They aren't allowed on reboot campaigns: when a restart happens is already up to the reboot policy, and an overnight restart is usually what you want.

How long "wait" waits

Both kinds of wait stop after respect_focus_max_wait_seconds, one hour by default, and then show the message anyway, so a long meeting or a 14-hour quiet window doesn't keep your RMM job waiting forever. 0 means show at once.

If you'd rather wait for the window to pass than run past it, use "skip" and let your RMM's next scheduled run (or a hosted campaign's next hourly check) show it after hours are over. Combined with show_once, the campaign then appears once, at a sensible time.