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 donât add posts to explain how the conversation was re-arranged, it feels jarringly incoherent, like youâre the only person in the conversation who lacks crucial context to understand whatâs going on.
Itâs supposed to be a conversation! Those are messy by nature. Trying to organize it more than necessary just kills it. Thereâs wikis for rigidly structured information (and VCV could really use a good one)
Iâll have to think more about what youâve written but I was having the same thought that really announcements should be âread-onlyâ 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 donât care how many announcements there are. If a dev has a hundred a year to make that doesnât 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 donât 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!?
Why in the world would we ever need a âsingle plugin threadâ? This doesnât make sense. Youâre 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 pluginâs manual. Threads should always be about the original post, not simply ârelatedâ in some way to it.
First off, itâs called a âpluginâ, not a âpackâ. I wouldnât normally bring this up, but if youâre a moderator, you need to be aware of the proper terminology.
Forum space is free. Thereâs 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? Thatâd 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 donât understand it, you donât have to participate, but this is precisely how Announcements works.
I agree with separate module announcements (or new releases of several modules) and if youâre 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.
Iâm 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. â[insert brand] #announcementsâ
It is being made more complicated now but whatever way it should be Iâll happily go withâŚ
