API Operation for Custom Notifications in Notification Center

Sample use cases: 

Custom Points are Awarded 

I used this quite a bit, leveraging Zapier to award custom point totals based on contributions that aren’t automated out-of-the-box with Gamification. Sometimes the points are triggered by a manual input into a google sheet, other times they are triggered by a webhook. 

Regardless, I’d love to notify users of these points (and provide positive reinforcement!) via the notification center when it’s available. 

It could leverage the same format, requiring

• UserId of recipient
• Message content
• UserId of “sender” (if this is important, all the examples have a username of someone who triggered the notification with a reply, like, @ mention, group invite)
• Date/time of notification (automated by the operation)

Example: 

@Community Admin awarded you 100 points for speaking on the webinar. Thanks for sharing your insights!

Custom Announcements

Any use cases for emails or PMs that don’t need to be an email/PM. 

I might want to do a badge notification, rather than a PM or email notification. I could trigger that on a webhook and create a notification instead. 

Or maybe there’s a way to tie it to segments or other user events events. 

Survey Reminder Example:

1. Survey participation is tracked with a custom role or badge
2. User Log in webhook event
3. Zap to look up user and whether they have the survey custom role
4. If not, sends the custom notification through 

@Community Admin invites you to take our annual survey. There are only 3 days left! 

It’s better than an email for all the all the obvious reasons. It’s fewer clicks than a PM (plus there’s now way to send PMs via API). But, most importantly, it’s triggering a notification while they are on the community. 

This sounds like it would open up a ton of capabilities!

I’d give this several upvotes if I could. It would be really helpful.

Bumping this idea since there’s a CC Product Research thread about concepts for improving the notification center. 

You give us so much potential to automate and customize via API operations, webhooks, etc. This tool is critically absent from our toolkit. 

There are some parts of each unique community experience that won’t fit the scope of what should be designed for all communities. Giving us this tool would address that gap and allow us to tailor community experiences and automated moderation to what best suits our communities. 

Here’s another use case: 

Nudges to mark an answer or add detail to a thread

I’ve been doing this via a manually triggered automation for years and it’s proved to be quite helpful for moving questions to answered status (our 2025 answer rate was >92%). 

In my daily moderation, I add a moderator tag that triggers a set reply from me asking them to mark an answer from the existing replies or add more detail of where they still need help. 

The issue is that this clutters up the thread of the post: it’s an actual reply. I’d love to be able to do that via a custom notification. 

(Sure, maybe you could build that same thing into AI moderation. (I won’t mind if you do.) But there will still be other unique use cases to our communities strategies and moderation styles that could be delivered the same way via a simple automation. In fact, I thought of another use case...)

Notifications of moderator actions

Let’s say a moderator (human or AI) takes a low impact action that we want to let users know about (the stuff outside the for DSA compliance): 

• moving a topic to a different category
• converting a question to a conversation 
• making a slight edit to a title to correct a typo and optimize search 
• Letting users know the post has been flagged by others for poor quality / inaccuracy (AI generated)