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by freeflight 3079 days ago
> If that confirmation window is on every message drill or not, then it would be completely useless. Users have been trained to click past/ignore pop-ups.

That would apply to something that's used routinely, I'm not sure this system is actually used that often. Do these emergency systems send out "this is a drill" messages really that regularly? As a non-US person that sounds like a quite scary way to live.

Even if it is something that gets used regularly, adding additional levels of confirmation, depending on the kind of alert that's gonna be sent out, would already go a long way of preventing this kind of mistake.

For the real deal add some bold and flashing text along the lines of "This is the NOT A DRILL message, are you sure about sending this?" which pops up as a second confirmation screen, while drill messages have only one confirmation screen.

1 comments

> That would apply to something that's used routinely, I'm not sure this system is actually used that often. Do these emergency systems send out "this is a drill" messages really that regularly? As a non-US person that sounds like a quite scary way to live.

Per the explanation provided by the agency, this is a drill that is conducted at every shift change, so presumably multiple times a day. I gather it does not send any actual alert to the public, just simulates it (perhaps sends to a small pool of test devices?) But it's appearing more and more likely that we've been giving a misleading explanation for this incident so who knows.