Your searches run on our servers day and night. Notifications are the only time L.O.O.T. reaches out to you, so it's worth understanding exactly where they arrive and what to do so they don't get lost along the way.
The two channels: app and Telegram
L.O.O.T. can alert you in two ways, and you can use both together.
- In app: the standard notification on your phone or computer. This is the main channel, and it turns on by itself when you grant permission.
- Telegram: a message from our bot. It's optional, but it's the simplest way to get alerts on any device, even when your computer is off, and on iPhone, where the app isn't available yet.
You can see the status of both channels in the app's Notifications panel, under Channels. If Permission denied appears next to “In app”, the system has blocked notifications: the Open system settings button takes you straight to the right place to turn them back on.
What happens on each device
| Device | When in-app notifications arrive |
|---|---|
| Android | Always, even when the app is closed, as long as the system doesn't put it to sleep to save battery. |
| Windows | Only while L.O.O.T. is open, including when it's minimized to the notification area next to the clock. |
| macOS | Only while L.O.O.T. is open, including when only its icon in the menu bar is showing. |
So on a computer it's best to have L.O.O.T. start at login and leave it minimized. You set this in Settings with Start L.O.O.T. at login. If you quit the app completely, notifications on the computer stop until you open it again. Your searches keep running, though: whatever they find is waiting for you in the history and, if you've connected it, on Telegram.
On Android, if notifications arrive late, the culprit is almost always battery saving. In your phone's settings open Apps, L.O.O.T., Battery and choose Unrestricted. In the app, the Delayed notifications box has a button that takes you straight there.
Connecting Telegram
To send you messages, the bot needs two things: that you've written to it at least once, because Telegram doesn't let bots contact people who have never started them, and your Chat ID, the number that identifies your chat.
- On Telegram, search for @LiveOnlineOfferTracker_Bot, open it and press Start. The bot doesn't reply. That's normal: from then on it can write to you.
- Find your Chat ID. The simplest way is to message a bot that returns it, such as @userinfobot: it replies with a message containing your ID, a number of eight to ten digits.
- In the L.O.O.T. app, open the Console, go to Scraper Configuration and paste the number into the Telegram Chat ID field. Save.
As long as the Chat ID is missing, the Channels section in Notifications shows the Chat ID missing warning, which reminds you where to set it.
Getting alerts in a channel
If you'd rather have alerts go to a Telegram channel, for example to share them with a business partner, create the channel, add @LiveOnlineOfferTracker_Bot as an administrator and in the same field write the channel name with the @ sign in front, such as @imieiaffari.
How deals arrive
When a search finds a new listing, you get a notification with the title, price and platform. Tap it to open the listing.
If a search finds many new listings at once, for example because you've just raised the maximum price, L.O.O.T. doesn't bury you. For each check cycle it sends at most three notifications per search. If there are more, you get a single summary alert pointing out the cheapest one. In any case you never receive more than ten notifications a minute.
Every listing found, including grouped ones, stays in the app's History.
Categories and quiet hours
In Notification preferences you choose what to receive, by category:
- Deals: the listings your searches find.
- Scraper status: how monitoring is doing, for example if it stops.
- Subscription and account: renewals, expiry dates, payments.
- Updates: when a new version of the app comes out.
- Announcements: messages from the team.
Some alerts are marked Always on and can't be turned off: these are service alerts, such as monitoring stopping or a problem with your subscription. If everything stops, you should know about it.
Quiet hours are off by default. When you turn them on, non-urgent notifications are held until the end of the window, which normally runs from 11 pm to 7 am Italian time (you can choose the range yourself). Deals, however, always arrive, even at night: a good listing at 2 am might be gone by 7. If you really don't want to be disturbed at night, use your phone's Do Not Disturb mode. Quiet hours apply to in-app notifications, not to Telegram messages.
Bell, archive and history
The app has two separate places, and it helps not to mix them up.
The bell collects everything except deals: monitoring status, subscription, updates, staff messages. You can use Mark all as read or Archive all. Archived notifications go to the Archived tab, where they stay for 30 days before being deleted automatically. Empty archive removes them right away. The archive is stored on the device, so each phone or computer has its own.
The history collects deals, meaning every listing your searches have found. Clear History clears it from view: listings already found stay on record, so you won't be notified about them a second time.
