Login as an admin Create a course Enrol a user into the course Create a forum activity in the course that students can post to. Enable event monitoring and setup an event monitoring rule for the forum event "Discussion created". site administration > reports > event monitoring rules Subscribe to the new event user menu (top right) > preferences > event monitoring Set messaging settings in the "Event monitor" section to allow "Popup notification" user menu (top right) > preferences > messaging Login as a student in the course. Create a discussion in the forum Run the cron. Login as the admin CONFIRM: Popup notifications should show. Note: Depending on your event subscription settings you may need to wait 1 minute between cron runs to avoid the cool down period for notifications. Also you may want to comment out the code between lines 8601 and 8606 in lib/moodlelib.php which prevent multiple notifications of the same type within an hour: // If the user was last notified over an hour ago we can re-notify them of old messages // so don't worry about when the new message was sent. $lastnotifiedlongago = $USER ->message_lastpopup < (time()-3600); if (! $lastnotifiedlongago ) { $messagesql .= 'AND m.timecreated > :lastpopuptime' ; }