What are Countdown and Curtain pages used for?

A Countdown page can be added to your experience to display content in advance of the experience launch, contrary to the name, it doesn't have to display a countdown to users, although one will be added by default. A countdown page is best thought of as a pre-entry phase, allowing you to display some form of teaser or 'warm-up' content in advance of the actual experience commencement.

The Curtain page can be added to your experience to display content before the experience is expired. This is commonly used to display featured or winning UGC or to display further information to visitors discovering the experience after the entry phase has passed.

How do Countdown and Curtain pages work with the Publish and Expiry dates?

It's important to understand that the Publish and Expiry dates you set are the ultimate boundaries of your experience availability to users, with this in mind, you will need to Publish your experience earlier than the entry date to display your Countdown page and schedule your experience to end later to display your Curtain page.

What to do

Firstly, we'll cover how to add the pages to your experience, this can either be done during the create experience wizard or at a later time after this.

Adding a Countdown/Curtain page

1. Open the Pages area of your experience.
2. Click Add a new page.
3. Click Countdown/Curtain Page
   
   
   

Setting the dates

Once you've added the pages to your experience, you will now need to set when to display these pages.

1. Open the Settings area of your experience.
2. You will see two new phases added:
   • Countdown phase until & Curtain phase from, add in a date for the Countdown page to be displayed until and a date to display the Curtain page from (Keep in mind, as mentioned earlier, these cannot extend beyond the Publish and Expiry dates of your experience)
     
     
   • An example time-line for a Giveaway experience:
     
     Published: 1st December 2019 09:00 AM
     Countdown phase until: 9th December 2019 09:00 AM
     Regular Experience Activity: 9th December 2019 09:00 AM until 31st December 23:59 PM
     Curtain phase from: 31st December 2019 23:59 PM
     Expiry: 5th January 2019 09:00 AM
3. Once you're happy with the date and time you set for both of these, click Update.

Adding content to be displayed

Once you've set the dates, you will need to add content to your Countdown and Curtain page as you would any other.

1. Open the Pages area of your experience.
2. Edit the Countdown page and Curtain page to display the required modules.
   Note that the Countdown module added to the Countdown page by default will need to have it's own date/time set in the module, it will not use the date set in the Settings area.