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Ideas Wanted: Handling Announcements Better
There's a bit of discussion starting about handling announcements better. There is often good content that we want to announce, but too many announcements clogs up the discussions list.
Vanilla has the ability to dismiss announcements, but some people feel that it's hard to find the options menu on a discussion.
This discussion was created from comments split from: How to Ask Questions on the Internet.
Vanilla has the ability to dismiss announcements, but some people feel that it's hard to find the options menu on a discussion.
This discussion was created from comments split from: How to Ask Questions on the Internet.
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grep is your friend.
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To me, there are often "editors choice" style discussions that we want to keep around for a bit to have them work through the discussion. However, you're right @x00, the forum doesn't look good with a big stack of announcements and a lot of forums do this. I wanted to be forced to look at the stack of announcements for a bit to see if any ideas come to mind.
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I do wish the options menu gave more of a hint it was there (there are things here you can use). Otherwise, unless you already know, it's hard to tell where the controls will be as they aren't there inside discussions for each post.
I'd split this out into another discussion if I had the power, because I think it's off-topic but a very important discussion about usability.
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Making the dismiss more intuitive.
Possibly rotating announcement, using jquery so they take up less physical space, though some don't like endlessly repeating ticker.
Perhaps collapsing announcements, with a hint for new announcements.
grep is your friend.
Was thinking on same lines , more / less sldedown or a la facebook new stories expander, for new announcements
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I like the idea of a more visible announcement / dismiss announcement label that is faded until you mouse over it. I also like the idea of collapsing announcements.
So this also plays into what to do with our options hover menu. Dismiss is one of a possible many options. For moderators there are always a handful of options. We also want plugin authors to have a place to add options to perform on discussions or comments.
This brings me to a point that was discussed earlier. On discussion pages there are links beside each comment. To me this is starting to look way too cluttered and is holding us back from adding more options we may find useful.
Mark has an idea that is about the same as @ddumont's idea. We make the options available on each discussion, but give it a faded appearance until hover. A faded options sprocket icon beside each discussion may look okay.
Keep the ideas coming. I'd love to hear stuff like "I did project x and it turned out well" or "this site y does something similar really well".
My theme does this and it works well. The date text (which doubles as the permalink) is aligned to the right and is always visible, but all the other options are hidden until mouseover and then they fade in. Definitely cuts down on clutter.
As for the Options menu, I feel like they should be limited to moderator functions or, as you said, as a place for plugins to put custom functions. If moderators know to always look in the options menu for what they need it becomes very intuitive. That said, you could consider using an options menu for comments as well. Again, just for moderator functions.
I think the international sign for "Dismiss this annoucement" is a small X in the upper right corner. Just like the messages feature has to allow visits to dismiss messages that are shown at the top.