Permanent Announcements/FAQs for forums

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1

Excuse me it this has been covered before, but I did a search on “Announcements” in the ATMB subject line (Any Date) and found nothing relevant.

Due to increased board traffic, both manhattan and Eutychus55 have recently posted “Moderator’s Notes/Request from the Moderators Threads” in GQ and MPSIMS respectively. Although both are quite important and something every poster should read, especially the newer ones, of course they keep slipping off the first page. Because I thought it was important, I bumped manhattan’s thread from the second page a short time ago, and I note that as I write Euty’s thread is on the third page of MPSIMS.

Is there some reason involving software or board policy that these could not be made into “Announcements” rather than threads, and thus appear at the top of every page in the forum? This suggestion has already been made by several posters on manhattan’s thread, but there has been no explanation why it wasn’t done in the first place.

It seems to me that an announcement entitled “Please read before posting in this forum for the first time” could be useful for most if not all forums, especially to elaborate on individual forum descriptions and conventions. And perhaps ATMB could include an Announcement saying "Please read before posting in any forum?

Lynn recently stated, in a thread related to Euty’s announcement:

But wouldn’t putting FAQ in an “Announcement” be a quick-and-dirty way to get this information on the board, and be relatively easy to modify as the need arose? Of course I know nothing about the procedure and perhaps it is more difficult than it appears.

The ATMB “Announcement” could include:

  1. More complete descriptions of the forums. After all, GQ’s “Got a question for the Teeming Millions (and possibly Cecil) to consider?” is pretty vague. Sure you can eventually figure out that GQ is solely for factual questions, but that may take a bit of lurking. Given the apparently large recent influx of newbies, it wouldn’t hurt to spell this out in words of one syllable.

  2. Forum conventions, such as providing a link to the column in CCC and CSR. (Of course Arnold mentions this in every single thread in CCC, but I bet way less than half of all OP’s do it.)

  3. Instructions on using the search engine, such as the use of + and “” (and does the damn thing allow Boolean operators? I’ve never tried), and a reminder to set the search for “Any Date” when checking to see if the topic has been covered before (the subject of several recent queries in ATMB).

  4. A direct link to the Registration Agreement. I for one can’t figure out how to access it (without searching for links in ATMB threads that mention it) because as I am using a LAN it always tells me, when I click on Registration, “Our records indicate you are already registered.” I think I might need to switch to a different computer to read the registration agreement (but I could be missing something here).

  5. Links to constantly those ever-popular threads that pop up occasionally, but are usually invisible unless you have the presence of mind to search for them, such as:

  • Details and examples of how to use vbCode

  • Commonly used board acronyms (IMHO, IIRC, AFAIK, etc.)

  • What do moderators do?

  • And of course, Fenris’s masterpiece-in-progress “How do you become a mod?” once it is finished.
    Once again, apologies if this has been touched on before. It seemed to be timely to bring it up, and it seems to be a way to address many of the kinds of repetive questions and errors that are contributing to board overload. I’m just wondering why the “Announcement” function is not used more than it is.

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One reason why Manny and Euty’s threads aren’t announcements is that announcements aren’t posted to specific fora, but to the entire board. Those threads are specific to those two fora, so it wouldn’t really make sense to cross-post them to the whole board.

On the other hand, more detailed descriptions of the fora on the main board page might well help a lot. Admins, maybe we could add the word “factual” to the GQ description, perhaps?

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Thanks, Chronos, that makes sense then. I was wondering if that might not be one of the reasons. But maybe something like a “Please read before first posting” Announcement, covering all forums, would be a quick-and-dirty way to get some useful FAQ onto the board without having to re-do the Board Faq, or serve as a stop-gap until that can be done? Someone mentioned that new users are registering at a rate of 14 a day, and others have said that many appear to be rather young. I have no idea if this is true, but it wouldn’t hurt to give new users all the help they can get. I personally would find such an announcement useful, even if all it did was link to the threads on vbCode, etc.