Tuning your HQ feed: focus areas, content volume, formats, topics

What this covers

Your HQ feed blends two different things into one stream: your network's own activity (signals, broadcasts, decision plan rollouts, consent responses, franchisee adoptions) and restoration-industry news, articles, videos, podcasts, and events. Verinode gives you two layers of control over how that mix shows up.

The first layer, focus areas, only ever changes the order network signals appear in. It never removes one. The second layer, content preferences (volume, formats, topics), controls how much outside news and learning content rides alongside your network activity, and it can genuinely filter that content out.

Two surfaces let you set these: a one-time first-run card called "Tune your feed," and a permanent panel in Settings where you can revisit every choice at any time. Both read and write the same saved preferences, so answering one is the same as answering the other, they can never drift apart.

Where to find it

The first-run card. The first time you open HQ with unset preferences, "Tune your feed" appears as the first slide in your feed at hq.verinode.ai/feed, on the All filter only. It shows once. If your account's one-time orientation walkthrough is also due, the walkthrough goes first and "Tune your feed" waits so the two never stack on top of each other.

The settings panel. Open Settings from the HQ sidebar, then click the Account tile (headline "Your Profile," subtitle "Profile, notifications, sign-in"). That opens the Account tab in the settings slider, where four sections stack top to bottom: your profile details, Notifications, Feed preferences, and Security. Feed preferences sits directly under Notifications, since both are "how HQ reaches you" settings for the same signed-in user.

Unlike the first-run card, the settings panel is permanent and holds every control, including focus areas, which the card doesn't ask about at all.

The first-run card: two quick questions

The card's header reads "Tune your feed", with the line: "A couple of quick taps so your network feed shows the right amount, in the formats you actually use. You can set your focus areas any time in settings."

1. 1"News and learning in your feed." Help text: "How much industry news, articles, and podcasts ride alongside your network signals." A three-way content-volume control (covered below) sets how much rides along.
2. 2"Which formats you take in." Help text: "We only show formats you keep on. Turn off anything you never open." A set of format toggle pills (covered below) sets which formats you'll ever see.

Two buttons close it out:

• Save writes whatever you picked across both questions and stamps your preferences as tuned.
• Not now also stamps your preferences as tuned, but writes nothing else, so you keep the defaults (content volume "Just the essentials," every format on) until you change them yourself in Settings.

Either button makes the card disappear immediately and for good. There's no snooze. The mechanism behind this is a single timestamp, tunedAt: it starts out unset for every HQ user, and the moment you tap either button, Verinode stamps it with the current time. The card's entire job is checking whether that timestamp is set; once it is, the card never renders again, on this account, on any device. The only way to change these two settings after that is the Settings panel.

Note what the card does not ask: it never touches your network focus areas. Those default to every area turned on and can only be set in Settings.

The settings panel: four groups

Inside Settings → Account → Feed preferences, four groups stack top to bottom, each its own section with a heading and a short help line. There's no separate save per group: one Save Changes button at the bottom writes all four at once.

Group 1: Areas that matter most to you

Heading: "Areas that matter most to you." Help text: "We weight these up in your network feed. Nothing is ever hidden."

Six toggle pills, one per network business area:

• Compliance & risk
• Adoption & operations
• Margin & cash
• People & labor
• Vendors & equipment
• Reputation

Every pill starts turned on (filled copper) for every new HQ user. This is a deliberate difference from the operator-facing IQ feed, where two areas start de-emphasized by default: HQ starts every area at full weight, since a network leader shouldn't have compliance or safety exposure quietly buried without asking for that.

Tapping a pill toggles it off (it returns to a neutral outline) or back on. Turning an area off does not hide its signals: it simply stops giving that area's network signals an extra boost toward the top of your stream, so they surface at their ordinary priority instead of ahead of the line. Turning an area back on restores the boost. There is no way, from this control, to make a network signal disappear from your feed altogether; the weighting is purely additive.

Each focus area maps to the kinds of network signals it boosts: Compliance & risk covers compliance, risk, governance, and safety signals; Adoption & operations covers operational and rollout-impact signals; Margin & cash covers margin and commercial signals; People & labor covers team and labor signals; Vendors & equipment covers vendor, equipment, fleet, and facilities signals; Reputation covers reputation signals.

Group 2: News and learning in your feed

Heading: "News and learning in your feed." Help text: "How much industry news, articles, and podcasts ride alongside your network signals."

A three-way control sets your content volume:

• Decisions only: strips learning content out entirely, no articles, videos, podcasts, or industry events. Your network signals and stack-relevant vendor news still come through.
• Just the essentials: a lighter sprinkle of news and learning content. This is the default for every HQ user who has never touched the setting.
• Keep me current: the fullest volume of outside content.

This control only touches quantity of learning content (articles, videos, podcasts, events). It does not touch your network's own activity, that's never rationed by this dial. It also does not touch vendor news: vendor-flavored content rides alongside your network signals regardless of this setting, since it's treated as stack-relevant rather than general reading. Vendor news is still governed by the Vendors & equipment topic in Group 4, so you can turn it off there if you don't want it.

Group 3: Which formats you take in

Heading: "Which formats you take in." Help text: "We only show formats you keep on. Turn off anything you never open."

Three toggle pills: Articles, Videos, Podcasts. All three are on by default.

This is a hard filter, not a weighting. Turn Videos off and no video card appears in your feed at all, full stop, it isn't dimmed or deprioritized, it's absent. You can't turn every format off at once: if you try to deselect the last one remaining, the toggle simply ignores the tap and keeps at least one on, so a stray click can never blank your entire content stream silently.

Industry events aren't gated by format. An event listing isn't an article, a video, or a podcast, so it's unaffected by what you select here (it still answers to the content volume setting in Group 2).

Group 4: Topics you care about

Heading: "Topics you care about."

Five toggle pills, all on by default:

• Market & economy
• Peer benchmarks
• Vendor & equipment news
• Compliance & regulation
• Training & best practices

Like format, this is a hard filter: turn off a topic and content tagged to it stops appearing, whether it's an article, video, podcast, or (for Vendor & equipment news specifically) a vendor news card. Verinode derives each content item's topic itself from what the content already carries, article by article, it isn't asking you to pick specific outside publishers or authors. There's no source picker here on purpose: Verinode anonymizes source names everywhere in the product, so picking by subject is the closest equivalent to picking your sources.

Saving your changes

Every change in the settings panel (focus areas, content volume, formats, topics) stays in local state until you press Save Changes at the bottom. While the save is in flight, the button reads "Saving…". On success, a toast confirms "Feed preferences saved." If the write fails, a toast reports the error instead (or a generic "Failed to save" message), and nothing on your account has changed, so it's safe to press Save again.

A saved change takes effect immediately: your HQ feed at hq.verinode.ai/feed and the settings panel itself both reflect it the next time they load, no reload required. The same preferences also drive the equivalent mobile HQ feed and settings screens, so a change made on web or mobile applies everywhere.

How tunedAt retires the card for good

Every HQ user's feed preferences carry a single field, tunedAt, alongside focus areas, content formats, content topics, and content volume. It starts null for a user who has never engaged with either surface.

Three things can set it:

• Tapping Save on the first-run card (along with writing whatever you picked on the card's two questions).
• Tapping Not now on the first-run card (writing nothing else, just the timestamp).
• Saving from the Settings panel for the first time, which writes tunedAt alongside every other field you set there.

Once tunedAt holds any timestamp, the first-run card's one condition for appearing (an unset tunedAt) is no longer true, so it stops rendering on the feed, permanently, for that account. There's no way to bring it back short of Verinode support resetting the field: the intended path back to these settings after the first run is always the Settings panel, never the card.

Empty states

The "Tune your feed" card has no partial, loading, or empty version: it either renders (tunedAt is unset) or it doesn't (tunedAt is set). There's nothing in between. If your network's feed has no network signals or content yet because data hasn't started flowing in, the card still appears first, tuning your preferences doesn't depend on having anything in the feed yet to tune.

If a read of your saved preferences fails for any reason (for example, before the underlying preferences table exists on a very new account), Verinode falls back to the same defaults described above (every focus area on, content volume "Just the essentials," every format and topic on, tunedAt unset) rather than showing a broken settings panel. Once your preferences do exist, the settings panel and the first-run card both read the same coerced values every time, so a partial or malformed saved row can never blank your whole feed or leave a control in an undefined state.

Related reading

• The HQ feed: the stream these preferences tune, its six sources, and how it's ordered.
• Network health and HQ programs: the network signals and decision plans that focus areas weight.
• HQ benchmarks: where the Peer benchmarks topic's content originates.
• Network Health: your HQ command home, where the deeper signal detail behind these focus areas lives.