Reviewing and handling alerts

Who this is for: whoever receives Noviscan's alerts and has to do something about them. Assumes: Noviscan is installed, at least one source is feeding it, and you are signed in. A viewer account is enough to read; acting requires an operator account. Applies from version: 0.1.3

Noviscan produces two distinct things, and confusing them wastes time: an alert, which calls you, and a review, which awaits your opinion without calling you. This page says what causes each, where to read them back, and what you can do with them.

The three screens, and what each holds

• Dashboard — the detections chart over time, with three categories: Suspects, Reviewed, Auto-identified. Clicking a slice of the chart opens the alerts for that period.
• Alerts — the list of what called you, with its images.
• Review — the detected faces Noviscan could not name, or was not sure enough about. Nothing here alerted you: this screen awaits your opinion, it does not report an incident.

What raises an alert — and what does not

This is the most useful part of this page, because a system that alerts too much disarms itself in the mind of whoever watches it.

Does NOT raise an alert:

• a whitelisted person being recognised — never, under any circumstances. The whitelist is the list of people whose presence is normal at your place: entering it is decided name by name, on the People screen, and it is that act which silences the alerts concerning them. See "Managing recognised people".;
• a face already seen at the same place within a close interval: Noviscan does not re-alert on the same appearance;
• a detected face whose likeness falls in the uncertainty band, or that is not front-facing enough: it goes to Review, without calling you;
• a named person belonging to a group disarmed at that hour. A group gathers people under one name; its schedule says, slot by slot on a 7-day × 24-hour grid, whether their presence must raise an alert ("Armed (alert)") or stay silent ("Disarmed (silent)"). It is set in sidebar → Groups, Schedule button; everything is disarmed by default. A Premium feature. ⚠️ This disarming never applies to a genuinely unknown face: an unknown person alerts even during a disarmed window.

Raises an alert:

• an exploitable unknown face;
• every new appearance of a person filed under the reserved name Suspect. You file someone under it with the red 🚩 Suspect button of the person picker, which opens in Review, from an alert, or from a person's record. That name is always alerting: it alerts again every time, and is never offered for review.

Reading back: the filters on the Alerts screen

• Period: Today, 7 days, All — or the slice you clicked on the dashboard chart.
• Source: the originating camera or folder.
• Status: All, Pending, Resolved.
• Name, and a free-text search across name, source or file.

⚠️ "Resolved" is not something you do. That status is derived: an alert counts as resolved once the face has been given a name, in review or by correction. There is no "mark as handled" button: Noviscan does not know the difference between an alert you have dealt with and an alert you have identified.

What you can do with an alert

• Archive it — it leaves the main grid without being deleted. The Archive this alert button is on the alert's card itself, in the same place as the Unarchive that undoes it; Archive this suspect handles all of their appearances in one act. Operator account.

  Where to find it again: further down the same screen, in the Archived (N) section, which only appears when something is in it. The Status filter has no "archived" value and makes no difference here: that section shows whatever the filter is set to. To undo, the Unarchive this alert — or Unarchive this suspect — button on the card itself.

• Identify it — give the face a name, which makes it count as resolved and feeds future recognition. See Managing recognised people.

  How you know it worked: a green banner reads "Face identified: Name." — it carries the name that was recorded, which is where picking the wrong neighbour in the list becomes visible. The face leaves the queue and the screen moves to the next one; the n / total counter shows it.

• View its image, and its video if you are on the Premium plan.

Where alerts arrive

These channels genuinely exist in this version:

⚠️ The webhook deliberately carries no image, and no link to one: an image address reachable outside Noviscan would be a step back for privacy, not one convenience fewer.

⚠️ Channels are not configured from the interface. The Settings → Advanced screen shows them read-only: the mail server address, the tokens and the webhook addresses are set in the config.yaml file, and the change requires a restart. On a default Windows installation, that file is C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Noviscan\config.yaml — see "Running Noviscan day to day", section "The configuration file".

⚠️ SMS, Teams, MQTT and Home Assistant do not exist in this version, whatever an older document may say.

How long an alert stays readable

Two durations act separately, and that is what surprises:

• Images are erased after thirty (30) days, but the alert stays in the list — you will read it back without its photo.
• The alert itself disappears after ninety (90) days, together with the presence records that feed the Auto-identified category of the chart.
• An alert's video (Premium) is kept only seven (7) days: beyond that, the button remains, the video is gone.

These durations are settings; changing them is restricted to administrator accounts, under Settings → Advanced.

What you cannot do

• ⛔ Delete an alert. No deletion exists: archiving hides it, it does not erase it. Only the expiry of the durations above makes it disappear.
• ⛔ Export the history. There is no export of alerts, neither CSV nor other. (The log viewable in the settings is not an export of alerts.)
• ⛔ Read back presence in detail. Recognitions of whitelisted people are recorded and counted in the chart, but no screen lists them one by one.

If something goes wrong

• I receive no alerts although the camera works. Check that monitoring is started on the dashboard, then that the detected person is not whitelisted — a whitelisted face never alerts.
• A known person alerts continuously. They are most likely filed under the reserved name Suspect, which re-alerts on every appearance. This is intended.
• Too many alerts about passing strangers. Look at the framing of the source first; a disarmed group will not help, disarming does not apply to unknown faces.
• The alert is there but the image is gone. It is more than thirty days old: the record survives, the file does not.
• I cannot see the archive buttons. Your account is a viewer.

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Applies to Noviscan 0.1.3. The labels quoted are those of the application in this version; if they differ on your side, your version is not this one.