Everything below reflects the current release (v1.0.0). From install to a fully mapped, selectively silent dashboard is one observe week and about ten minutes of your attention.
You need WordPress 6.0+ on PHP 7.4+, an administrator login, and the plugin zip plus licence key from your purchase email. One honest note before you begin: the plugin hides nothing in its first week — that's the observe mode working as designed — and the safety rails are hard rules, not preferences. Form feedback always shows, core security notices need an explicit opt-in to hide, and any unexpected error fails open and shows everything.
Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip from your purchase email, install and activate. It adds a Nag Silencer item to the admin menu. Activation changes nothing visible yet — the plugin starts in observe mode, watching rather than hiding.
Open Nag Silencer → Licence and paste the key from your purchase email into the licence box — it's a long code starting VPC1., so paste the whole thing into the textarea rather than typing it. Keys are domain-based — no account, no phoning home.
For the first week the plugin captures and attributes every notice but hides nothing. Leave it alone and use the site normally. By Friday the log shows exactly what your dashboard shouts: which plugin, what kind of nag, how often, on which screens. You can end observe mode early or extend it under Settings → Observe mode.
Open Nag Silencer → Log. Every captured notice is listed with three columns that matter: the notice, its type, and its owner — the plugin or theme it was traced back to. Sort by owner to see who shouts most; the usual verdict is two or three plugins producing most of the noise.
From any log entry, click Hide notices from this plugin to create a global rule. Hidden notices keep landing in the log — silenced, not deleted. The safety rails hold regardless: form feedback always shows, core update and security notices stay visible unless you flip the explicit opt-in, and the plugin's own licence notices are exempt.
Under Rules → Roles, choose which roles see which notices — the usual pattern is clients calm, admins everything. Add fingerprint rules from the log for surgical control over one specific banner. Under Digest, set the weekly email recipients. Under Report branding, add your agency logo, name and colours and generate the digest report — print-ready HTML and a downloadable PDF.
The screens and safeguards you'll actually live with.
Plugins print their banners through the WordPress admin-notice system. Nag Silencer buffers that output just before it renders, records each notice with the callback that produced it, and traces that callback to its owning plugin or theme. Owners come from where the code lives, not from guessing at the message text.
The first week is deliberate: a week of logging before anything is hidden. Rules written on day one are guesses; rules written against a week of evidence are decisions. Observe mode is a setting, not a countdown — end it early on a site you know, extend it on a site you've just inherited.
Everything captured, forever visible: the notice text, its type — update nag, review beg, upsell box — its owner, the screens it appeared on and a count of repeats. Hidden means logged instead of shouted. Nothing is deleted, so any decision can be reviewed and reversed.
The free edition's workhorse: per plugin, show or hide. One rule usually silences a plugin's whole repertoire of nags at once, and the rule keeps catching the reworded versions that arrive with updates — because attribution follows the plugin, not the message text.
The same dashboard, two experiences: the client's account sees calm, your admin account sees everything you chose to keep. Rules apply per role, so an editor, a shop manager and an administrator can each get exactly the notice level their job needs.
Sometimes a plugin is mostly worth hearing but has one banner you never want to see again. A fingerprint rule targets that specific notice — matched on its content signature, not its position — and leaves the plugin's other notices alone.
Once a week, everything that was hidden: by plugin, by type, with counts — plus what was surfaced on purpose. Review it in two minutes; promote anything that deserves the dashboard back with one click. Pro sends the digest by email, so the review happens even in weeks you never open wp-admin.
Four rails, none of them optional settings you can trip over. Form feedback always shows. Core update and security notices hide only via an explicit opt-in toggle with its own warning. The plugin's own licence notices stay visible. And any unexpected error during capture fails open — everything shows — because suppressing wrongly is worse than noise.
The weekly digest, dressed for the client: your agency logo, name and colours, the hidden-notice league table, what was surfaced, what was protected. Print-ready HTML and a real downloadable PDF — “the noise we managed for you this month”, attached to the retainer report.
One textarea, one Activate button. Paste the full VPC1.… key from your purchase email. The key covers the number of sites on your plan; move a site by deactivating on one and activating on another. On multisite, rules and logs are scoped per site.