Or we could do something that is user friendly.

Update: Sorry, that was entirely too flip. Yes, your solution has a user friendliness element. However, I don't see that it is as close to an ideal solution as my proposal. (a) Announcements would still be scattered among the other PMDs. This isn't bad, but it isn't ideal (IMHO). (b) As PMDs, announcements could be replied to by monks. I think they shouldn't be susceptible to this kind of cluttering influence.* (c) All Monks will able to post a node that looks like an announcement. Yes, the janitors can go clean up such messes, but it would be better to prevent them in the first place... especially when an RSS feed is involved, and other caching issues.

* It will happen. It's like a law of nature. For example, I posted XY Problem with the intention that it serve as a kind of unofficial reference document. I didn't want votes, and I didn't want replies. I got lots of both. For me this was an unpleasant learning experience. In hindsight, I probably should have posted it as a sitefaqlet; but I asked people's opinions on this first, and most were opposed.

Feed back in the forms of votes, replies, etc, should always be welcome and not avoided. Your post was an excellent post and I don't think it lost any value by being voted for or replied to. In fact it probably gained a lot of influence for newbs when they see the replies and can tell that they arn't the only people to make this mistake and its not a horrible thing, just a fact of life. The point about anyone being able to post it is both good and bad, but we have a good set of janitors who do a good job keeping the site clean, and a good set of users who tend to follow the unspoken rules so I think that while its a flaw in theory, in practice it wont realy be an issue.

My whole point was that some minor search mechanism can be linked to that will pull out just those posts so that while they would still be in PMD they wouldn't be buried in there amongst other stuff.

I, for one, think that any announcment system should allow and encourage discussion. Discussion can help clarify why a change occured, how it can be used, and in many cases how it can be turned off (sense we have lots of people who like things the way they are and hate change. ;) )


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Eric Hodges

I also disagree that voting / replying are undesirable distractions to announcements; feedback from the user base in response to site changes is an important feature. But I think the wiki would be useful as a place to concentrate site update information and to include stuff that is too "small" to warrant a new root node. So it'd contain links to and barest summaries of PMDs related to site changes for the last month or so and also include little tidbits culled from the list of recently applied patches, and all be presented in an attractive and more useful style (rather than just a list of node titles or a collections of root nodes, some of which don't really apply, etc.).

Maybe people would look there (if it existed) when they noticed a site change and wondered about it, rather than asking in a preplexed and exasperated manner about it in the chatterbox when there was a root node in PMD about it yesterday. ;)

- tye        

How is that not user friendly? If you have a link up top right labeled "Site Announcments" that automaticaly returns a page with the headlines of the recent announcments (a super search of some sort) and an RSS feed?

I realy don't appreciate a response like that when you posted this here for discussion. If you have issues with my idea then please discuss them don't just dismiss them.


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Eric Hodges