Text and Input Text Entities Stopped Using

[Normanras]

I am not sure if this is an issue yet, so I wanted to ask here first. Is anyone else having an issue with on_change option with certain types of sensors?

I have been using a text sensor as my alert tracker and as of recently, I think v1.3.1, alerts are not being triggered for my text entities despite the sensor being updated. This is the same for input_text (helpers) and text (MQTT). The default yaml is:

alerts:
  - entity: text.bird_detections
    operator: "="
    state: on

And with/without the on_change: true, the alert card doesn't visualize on state change. If I remove on_change and change it to:

alerts:
  - entity: text.bird_detections
    operator: contains
    state: a

then it works, but that seems inefficient and also incorrect for how the on_change option should be working. I tested this with a few different entities, including text, input_text, number, input_number, and sensor and the results were the same.

Happy to move this over to issues if it's truly that, but perhaps I've misconfigured something.

I'm on the following versions:
HA (Docker): 2026.5.2
AlertCard: v1.3.2.5

[djdevil]

Hi! This is caused by a behaviour change introduced in v1.3.2.5 — and your config is hitting it directly.

What changed in v1.3.2.5

Before v1.3.2.5, on_change: true fired on any state change and completely ignored state / operator. Those fields were silently skipped in the on_change path.

In v1.3.2.5, state + operator were made to act as a current-state filter: the alert still fires on any change, but is only displayed while the entity is actually in the declared state. This fixed a real use-case (#83) but broke configs that relied on the old "ignore state in on_change mode" behaviour.

Why your config stops working

• entity: text.bird_detections
  operator: "="
  state: on # ← this is the literal string "on"
  on_change: true
  A text entity (or input_text, sensor) never has state "on" — its state is whatever text value it holds (e.g. "Robin 12:45"). After v1.3.2.5, the filter is enforced, so the alert fires on change but is immediately hidden because the entity is never in state "on".

Fix — remove the state filter if you just want any change:

alerts:

• entity: text.bird_detections
  on_change: true
  message: "🐦 Bird detected: {state}"
  Or filter to a specific value you actually expect:

alerts:

• entity: text.bird_detections
  on_change: true
  operator: contains
  state: "Robin"
  message: "Robin spotted: {state}"
  The operator: contains workaround you already found works for exactly this reason — it matches the real text value instead of the literal "on".

Sorry for the disruption — I'll add a note to the docs to clarify this behaviour.

[Normanras]

Thank you very much for the clarification! Good to know I wasn't going crazy 🥴