Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Centralized Discussion/Announcements

For those who haven't noticed, the announcements previously located at the top of each page have been removed (around a month ago, in fact). This was due to a couple reasons:

• Few people who read the wiki care about the announcements, since most of them apply to editors (with the exception of reporting vandalism).
• The announcements change so rarely that people who do read them get tired of constantly seeing them everywhere ("Report vandalism at DF:AIV")
• The announcements took up a lot of space - even though they were supposed to auto-hide, sometimes it could take a while before the script to hide them loaded.

However, it's still nice to have announcements somewhere so people know what's going on around the wiki. My suggestion is that they go on Special:RecentChanges, which is essentially the equivalent of Wikipedia's watchlist (there is little enough activity that hardly anyone needs to check their watchlist on this wiki).

The announcements are currently located here, and I recently added a link to them on the sidebar.

A couple proposals (they aren't all mutually exclusive - more than one location for announcements would be fine):

• Link to the announcements from the sidebar, and have a "new" indicator appear when there are new announcements (similar to how the old announcements box wouldn't auto-hide after being updated until you clicked "hide" again).
• Include announcements at the top of Special:RecentChanges, which most editors check regularly.
  • Optional: Don't link to announcements in the sidebar, but include the "new" indicator next to the recent changes link instead.
• Allow users to choose where the announcements indicator should go in their preferences (which would be complicated, but could work).
  • Optional: Also allow users to choose where the announcements should appear. This would be prone to slow loading times, which means that, for a few seconds while the page is loading, the announcements could appear in undesired locations or not show up where they should.
  • Note that this only applies to logged-in users, so there would still need to be a default location for announcements.

Also, another question is the placement of active discussions (DF:Centralized Discussion). Most recent discussions there have been small and didn't attract much attention. I already set up the announcements to include a list of active discussions (the second box). Any thoughts on this?

(The main reason I added the sidebar link was to draw attention to this discussion. I can certainly change things if people strongly object to the way it's set up currently.)

—Lethosor (talk) 16:46, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

I like the announcements side bar option, personally, but I'm not sure overall where we should head with this. --Briess (talk) 04:09, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean things like centralized discussion? It just occurred to me that we could use a separate sidebar indicator for new announcements and new discussions (which I would like better than having everything in the same place) —Lethosor (talk) 04:37, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

I've barely edited since 2011, but for whatever it's worth, I think sidebar + red NEW box is an excellent idea. I used to check RecentChanges, but it's so full of spammers it's hardly worth it. Bognor (talk) 12:19, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

+1 Emi [T] 05:33, 24 February 2014 (UTC)