Why Some Users Never See Your Portal Announcements

[Edward Rosario]

I ran into a mystery recently—certain users insisted they never saw important Service Portal or Employee Center announcements. After some digging, I found the culprit: m2m_dismissed_announcement.

This little-known table stores a record every time a user clicks Dismiss on an announcement. Each entry links the announcement to the user, so once dismissed, it’s gone for them (depending on your announcement settings).

Here’s the part I didn’t know:

When creating an announcement, you can set how dismissal works:

• Permanent – hidden until the announcement expires.
• Session-only – gone until the user logs in again.
• Non-dismissible – sticks around until the end date.

Why this matters:

• Troubleshoot “I never saw it” claims by checking dismissal records.
• See engagement trends (read vs. instant close).
• Re-show critical updates by removing dismissal records.
• Improve UX by learning which messages get closed the fastest.

📌 Lesson learned: If you’re serious about users seeing your announcements, don’t sleep on this table—it’s a powerful tool for communication management in ServiceNow.

[UrvahZ · Accepted solution]

Some users never see your portal announcements because when they click dismiss, the system records this action and hides the announcement from them according to the dismissal settings. If dismissal is set to permanent, the announcement will no longer appear for that user, which can create the impression that they never saw it at all. Essentially, the system remembers their dismissal and prevents the message from displaying again, unintentionally hiding important announcements from users who dismissed them early.