Based on the discussion from Restrict the ability of new users to post project announcements?:
One potential idea we might consider is a new main category for Announcements with sub categories by type.
Potentially structured like this:
[!tip] Proposed Announcement category structure:
- Announcements
- Forum - what General > Forum Announcements is already
- Games - from Playing > Project Announcements as this original category was for games, but we could split other “I’m a long time forum user who’s written a book” into the “projects” or “other” subcategories as appropriate
- Projects
- Development systems
- Other
What this would enable:
- We could make a top level requirement to restrict new users from creating a new post in any announcement category.
- Users could selectively mute just Announcements > Development Systems completely (for example) if they wish to.
- This would tidy announcement messages which are scattered across other categories and create a defined space for all announcements including Development Systems - which don’t have a category and just use the new-platform tag right now.
- One potential downside - it’s a lot of structure for what is likely not a lot of messages; I assume the original project announcement category was a catch-all for anything. However this is a big enough issue that we have a hot thread about how Announcements are moderated and handled as we get an uptick of people promoting work.
[!abstract] This won’t prevent new users or anyone from posting an announcement in the wrong category…
So it would still be a community collaboration to flag posts in the wrong category, or for Regular users with the ability to move them as necessary if they’re appropriate but just in the wrong category.
People still likely would post in top-level Announcements but those are easily moved if necessary.
[!warning] Currently all original posts system-wide (in any category) by new user accounts who haven’t read the forum to gain trust level 1 are already being reviewed and approved or denied by moderators before they appear.
- The current Project Announcement category has an extra restriction that removes the “New Topic” button for Level 0 users already to discourage posting.
- Our goal as indicated by community feedback is to prevent “Drive By” project announcements from new user accounts who have no intention to participate in the forum or answer questions about their project. Even if these posts are legitimate IF projects, our community has indicated a preference to not allow promotion by non-community members.
- New users can still reply in any discussion to participate, and create original posts in other categories (such as asking for coding help). This activity helps builds trust via participation so they do eventually get access to post announcements.
With this potential new category structure, there would be some Admin work to be done to split the existing Playing > Project Announcements and messages tagged new-platform into correct subcategories, however I propose it would be sufficient to do this with mostly just more recent posts and keep any other original announcement topics archived under the “Other” subcategory so we’re not having to do surgery on the message archive all the way back to 2003.
We would rely on continued collaboration with our Regular users who have the ability to move existing topics to new categories to assist with this as necessary, or posts in the wrong category can be flagged by anyone as always.
[!Question] We welcome feedback and discussion about this
We don’t specifically need continuing soapbox arguments that drive-by announcements/spam/AI is bad - we hear you and are just seeking feedback and ideas about this potential Forum structure change.
This is a “voting” category, and you can use your upvotes in the OP/header bar to support this.
