In-App Messaging

Every authenticated user has a messaging inbox keyed to their player profile and roles. Direct messaging supports any-to-any conversations within a tenant — player to player, official to player, coach to athlete — with per-tenant policy gates that can restrict who may initiate (for example, only licensed members in good standing can DM officials).

Group messaging spins up automatically around platform objects: every team gets a team thread, every club gets a members thread, every commission gets a working thread. Membership tracks the underlying object, so adding a player to a squad adds them to the squad's group, and removing a coach revokes thread access at the same instant. Federation announcements are a one-to-many flavour: a communications officer composes once, picks a segment (all members, license holders only, age category, region), and the message lands in every recipient's inbox plus their preferred notification channel.

Message read receipts are timestamped per recipient, so a referee can see whether the players acknowledged the court change. File sharing accepts photos, scoresheets, PDFs, and short clips up to per-tenant limits, with virus scanning before the file becomes downloadable. Attachments inherit conversation permissions — they cannot be hot-linked outside the thread.

Message search runs full-text over the user's accessible threads, filtered by sender, date range, and attachment type. Conversations are stored with end-to-server encryption, deletion respects the federation's retention policy, and every message can be reported for safeguarding review (linking into F17). Push and email fall-back is delegated to the Notification System, so users with quiet hours configured will see a digest rather than a 22:00 ping.