Fair enough, lots of people don’t like FB. Anecdotally I would say I reach 20 to 100 times as many people with a FB post, so it would be silly for me not to post there.
There needs to be further discussion on it but for now yes. My concern is that a few years down the line there will be many superfluous topics in announcements that will have to be cleaned up.
There must be a more elegant solution than posting individual topics for each announcement especially if an announcement is for the same plugin pack, but at this time there is no back-end to accommodate announcements in a way that users see everything and is clean / balanced. Iv’e a few ideas regarding this that will probably be discussed in the staff category when Andrew has the time.
1 Like
News articles are never “cleaned up”. You can read NYTimes articles from 1851 here https://spiderbites.nytimes.com/, and not a word has changed since they were published.
Even these get Archived! 
What do you mean, and how is it relevant to this conversation?
Will people want to visit old threads for a complete history? Even if they do would it not be better to have them organised in the one thread by looking through edits of the top most post. Instead of manually searching that is.
Why not ask devs to maintain a single thread per plugin in Plugins & Modules (if they so wish) AND make fresh Announcements. The thread is then the (dev maintained) archive.
2 Likes
I like that solution Nik .
Nope, jumped to first unread reply from Bruce, 11 months later.
The title was edited back to the original title yesterday so this could be because of: after the fact, but if not then something changed to how this used to work.
I think from MindMeld’s point of view a new announcement thread per module / significant piece of news would definitely work best. We tend to release few modules, with a substantial time gap between each because we spend a long time on each one.
When our EqMaster announcement thread was merged with the MixMaster announcement yesterday we ended up having a new announcement 70 replies down on a 3 month old thread about a different module. The old thread was renamed to show it was for EqMaster which meant anyone familiar with and looking for the MixMaster thread title would have a hard time finding it (thread has since been separated again - thanks).
I see announcements like news articles - when you have a piece of news you post it in a new thread. All replies in that thread will be relevant to the announcement topic. If developers want to maintain their own thread in Plugins & Modules (as Nik suggested) I think that’s a good idea too. Having separate threads for each article also helps with keeping things neat and tidy imo - you could have announcements sorted by year for example and archive old announcements. It also makes things easier to find as there is one thread title per announcement and it stops threads becoming extremely long which they would do otherwise over time if there was just one announcement thread per developer.
1 Like
Either way is all good if there is a few announcements being made every so often, but for a pack like Nysthi @synthi or an aspiring developer who wants their pack to contain many more modules. How many announcements threads will there be by this time 2-3 years from the developer.
If a pack has many subscribers this does mean more replies I understand, but will users need or want to visit the first/third/tenth announcement. How far could someone stretch it also with announcing they have a new module, every 2 days every week? Do these get new posts each time?
What if the announcement was locked for replies and only the author can post? Each reply would be a new announcement, there is also markup formatting which can give each post a style. Doing this currently and keeping the discussion: very easy, filter by user which is available when you click on someones picture. Could this not be turned on by default @Vortico for announcements in order for users to see if there was a reply in each announcement, perhaps an un-filter button could become available or as suggested a discussion thread in plugins and modules. Editing the top post can also be filtered without scrolling through the discussion by clicking the the orange pencil icon, there you see the title of the announcement and the context. There is also making a post a wiki which has not been done yet so not sure how it looks.
Everything in the one place is very organised and requires the least interaction which will also promote a healthy forum for users and developers alike as the users will have read or skimmed through top most or filtered announcements and may have that extra time to skim through or few more or have more time patching.
It was a fair point Aria brought up about Facebook, this is not Facebook there is no need to spam with many announcement threads. Linking and styling a post is very easy here and should be even easier for developers; but what is the best solution, style and format that we can come up with that suits everyone? Having different solutions for everyone is no solution!
Honestly, around here, threads are split and merged so frequently, I find it hard to follow discussions. You enter a thread and the OP refers to things said earlier, or you see a big announcement mid-thread. Since the mods generally don’t add posts to explain how the conversation was re-arranged, it feels jarringly incoherent, like you’re the only person in the conversation who lacks crucial context to understand what’s going on.
It’s supposed to be a conversation! Those are messy by nature. Trying to organize it more than necessary just kills it. There’s wikis for rigidly structured information (and VCV could really use a good one)
3 Likes
I’ll have to think more about what you’ve written but I was having the same thought that really announcements should be ‘read-only’ and the rest should be in Plugins & Modules.
How best to organise Plugins & Modules is a separate issue - per module, per plugin, per dev etc - but announcements should be just that. Where I differ is that I don’t care how many announcements there are. If a dev has a hundred a year to make that doesn’t bother me.
This does, I admit, push the Nysthi problem elsewhere. One could go the KVR route and allow single dev forums. Perhaps to qualify for that you must have at least 20 ? 25 ? modules and have been active for a year or something (or some other number). If we don’t go that route then maybe you and Aria are right and we should think more about a wiki style solution.
In your solution, if users are not allowed to reply in the per-dev announcement thread, does Plugins & Modules have any preferred organisation or do users just create topics ad hoc about a particular module (as they do now)?
Once linked in a different topic you could see the context in the P&M thread (see example). If locked the chain icon on a post can create a new topic.
Any idea boils down to how they can get implemented, any idea I have myself needs to be researched.
If you are sharing a post, not too sure on this but, there can be plugins written for the forum that add features. So when clicking the share icon as well as create new topic perhaps post reply in existing topic!?
Here’s some info on wiki’ing posts: What is a Wiki Post? - users - Discourse Meta
Here’s a recent announcement… Using the search to find it.
https://community.vcvrack.com/search?q=Computerscare%20Modules%20%23announcements%20
But how many users will physically do this? I find searching here and on Facebook is under-used, this could be promoted more!
Why in the world would we ever need a “single plugin thread”? This doesn’t make sense. You’re taking the concept of a manual or wiki page and trying to adapt it into the concept of a forum thread. Forums are for discussions about whatever the OP posted, not one-stop information about a product. If you need a FAQ or single source of information, simply put it in your plugin’s manual. Threads should always be about the original post, not simply “related” in some way to it.
1 Like
First off, it’s called a “plugin”, not a “pack”. I wouldn’t normally bring this up, but if you’re a moderator, you need to be aware of the proper terminology.
Forum space is free. There’s absolutely no disadvantage of having hundreds of threads provided they follow the Announcements rules, i.e. relevant and professionally written like a news article. What if we have an announcement thread for Nysthi every time a new module is released? That’d be great! It will allow users to be kept up-to-date, and there is no disadvantage. If someone asks an off-topic question in the thread, it can be moved to its own thread in Plugins & Modules. Otherwise, users may ask about the announcement itself if clarification is needed.
A perfect example of this system is https://www.kvraudio.com/. Hundreds of thousands read these articles every week written by developers themselves. The system works well. If you don’t understand it, you don’t have to participate, but this is precisely how Announcements works.
3 Likes
I agree with separate module announcements (or new releases of several modules) and if you’re happy with plugin/module discussion happening in two separate places then it might be an idea to actively encourage separate announcements as there are some painfully long threads in Announcements because they are Plugin rather than Module threads (which is where the resumption of this discussion began). I can add a sticky if you like.
I’m aware of the terminology. If you are referring to the news tab on KVR this looks much neater that what #announcements is and will be. There replies are hidden, if you want to discuss you need an account to view the discussion which might be in a big thread, not sure. Past news articles and updates are linked at the bottom of pages also. Currently the only way to do this here is by linking all your announcements in the latest announcement. Or possible an easier solution would be to link to a search provided the announcement has an unique enough name. “[insert brand] #announcements”
It is being made more complicated now but whatever way it should be I’ll happily go with…