It would be really useful to me to be able to trigger an alert at a particular alert level at will, for testing.

It would be coolest to have a little option in the GUI for this, but alternatively if we could have a config option test_string="" where the test string is defined (so that we don't all have the same strings and an attacker therefore can't use it against us to blind us against real attacks).

Then all you need to do is include that test string, with a level number appended to it in an URL to cause a test alert of that alert-level.

I'm sure this would be easily possible with some custom rules, but my brain is too overheated to come up with something at the moment.