Admin Settings

Inquiries

One switch and one number, for the feature that lets an officer ask your community a question about an incident.

What it replaces

Officers used to ask in the server chat: "anyone see a red sedan near the bank?". That works, but it puts investigation traffic in a channel meant for everyone, and it shows the officer exactly which player answers — so they know who was involved before the investigation established it.

An inquiry moves that into the CAD. The question is public to your community; the answers are private between each person and the officer, who sees only Respondent A, Respondent B and so on.

The switch

On by default, and that is deliberate. A community that never uses it pays nothing: civilians see nothing at all until an officer opens a question. Off by default would mean nobody ever finds the feature.

Switching it off stops new questions being asked. It does not hide the tab, and it does not cut off conversations that are already running — threads stay readable and officers can still close them. That is on purpose: ending a conversation mid-sentence is worse than letting it finish.

The answer window

Default 30 minutes. This is the window for joining, not for the conversation.

• Within it, everyone in your community can see the question and answer it.
• Anyone who answers stays in that thread afterwards, whatever the clock says, until the officer closes it or the incident is closed.

So a longer window invites more people, it does not keep conversations open longer. If your community is small or quiet, a longer window gives people a realistic chance to see the question at all. If it is busy, a short one keeps the board from filling up.

Changing this does not move questions that are already open. Each one keeps the window it was asked with, so nobody's time limit shifts under them. The new value applies to the next question.

Two things to decide as a community

Opening a question tells everyone an investigation is running. The server chat did that too, but chat was fleeting and a question board is not. On top of the officer's words, the incident title, postal and street travel with every question — so an incident titled Suspected drug lab announces itself the moment anyone asks about it. Officers see exactly what will go out before they send, but it is worth saying out loud in your rules how incidents get titled.

The anonymity is a behavioural measure, not a technical guarantee. It is built to remove the accidental knowing-who-answered that chat forced on people, and in practice it does that. It is not a promise you should make to your players in stronger terms than that.

Moderation

Officers hide an answer rather than delete it. A hidden message disappears for the person who wrote it, stays visible to staff struck through, and can be unhidden. Nobody loses their place in a thread by being moderated.

Where players find it

Civilians get an Inquiries page in their sidebar, a line on their dashboard when something is open, and a message in the game chat when an officer opens one. Officers and fire/EMS find it on the incident screen, as a second view on the log column.

See Inquiries — Asking the Public for the officer's side and Inquiries for what your players see.