Announcement or stickied

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Announcement or stickied, that is the question.

Please look at Forum Review and the readcount of the announcement. I know the announcement is only a few days old, but 2 views? First view would have been when it was created, the second was me just looking at it now (it still had only 1 view 5 minutes ago).

Are (forum) announcements effective?

[Lizard King]

Maybe this is better then both announcement and stickied

In my board i never use announcements because of the same problem. I prefer to use stickies.

[peterska2]

I use a mixture. If it needs to be in more than one forum I use an announcement, otherwise I use stickies. The only problem with announcements in 3.5 is that they do not show on the new posts page so unless you go to the actual forums you don't know about them.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

And even on the forum page, they don't show bold or give an indecation that you haven' read them yet.

[Oblivion Knight]

I guess the word "guidelines" translates to many people that they're basically unenforced rules, and so they don't bother reading them..

[Marco van Herwaarden]

But running a thread like this in the Lounge already increased the pageview to 5 in a few hours.

PS In my book 'guidelines' are rules that are enforced but you want to bring them nice.

[MJM]

Originally Posted by peterska2

... The only problem with announcements in 3.5 is that they do not show on the new posts page so unless you go to the actual forums you don't know about them.

... too busy to go to each forum but have time to check out new posts of interests, and this one interested me

[bairy]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

Announcement or stickied, that is the question.

Neither.
Big black 150 pt text across the screen as a psuedo-tcat: READ THIS.

On a site I used to be on we had like advertise your website, and we used to get tons of junk so I made an announcement. It was size 30 bolded font in green (on default vb scheme). Very few people read it and still the junk came in. So I stuck a line break in and it was now 2 lines saying something like "all submissions are moderated, read here before submitting your site". Still the junk kept flying in and the read hit hardly moved.

So I made a sticky to supplement it. Again, only a couple of people read it and the junk still came in. 70 points of bolded green font + a sticky and people just weren't reading them. I honestly don't know why - eagerness to hit new thread I guess.

So... neither.


On another site I used to be on they actually put the announcements on newthread between the message textarea input and the submit button so you more or less /had/ to read them (or at least scroll past them) before making a new thread. Some people still didn't but it was quite effective for most.

[MJM]

Originally Posted by bairy

On another site I used to be on they actually put the announcements on newthread between the message textarea input and the submit button so you more or less /had/ to read them (or at least scroll past them) before making a new thread. Some people still didn't but it was quite effective for most.

Good one. Does any mod like this exist to insert message posting guidelines above or below message textarea as per forum?

[bairy]

I wouldn't know, I never asked how it was done.

I would imagine it's just a case of querying out the announcements for forum f on newthread.php, stuffing it into a variable and sticking that variable into the template for output. Probably easy.