You can now post announcements that will show up on everybody’s portal. They will be moderated before showing up, to prevent abuse. Please make the titles very descriptive, short, and to the point. Provide any details in the body of the message.
If you have any questions, please reply to this thread.
I’m excited to hear this! So valid types are team news, event news, etc?
Yep. Anything that you wouldn’t want people to miss.
Stuff that shouldn’t be posted: Happy Birthdays … Technical Questions … Things that only 1-2 people would care about … etc.
I’m still not sure whether or not these threads will just be an announcement pointing to another thread to discuss … or if the discussion will happen in the announcement thread – any ideas?
I would make the announcement threads pointer threads. This will allow moderators to easily check in/out (visibility perhaps?) portal announcements with no affect to the discussion.
See I think that this could work, but I disagree. I think it would be better to make the threads posted in the annoucement section discussion, not pointer threads. This way if anything did get out of hand or inappropriate, the mods would only have to shut down the one thread, as opposed to any and all subsequent threads that the original one “pointed” to. It would also (I think) discourage spam threads, which I have noticed are becoming more frequent, but are being well handled by the Moderators (good job!). The discussion announcement threads would be exactly that. If people wanted to post links to other helpful or similar threads, than that’s fine.
Also would any outdated, “unimportant”, or borderline on the topic of discussion threads be moved if deemed any of these things? For example, if someone posted a Happy Birthday, would it be moved/refered to the Chit Chat section or just deleted?
Just my thoughts.
–Mike
If someone wanted to create a User Announcement, how would they do it?
Would they start a new thread in the User Announcements sub-forum? (Currently general users don’t have permission to start a new thread here). Or do we make a thread in someplace like the General Forum and ask it to be moved here?
Whoops … Yeah, create a thread in ‘User Announcements’. You should have access now.
… i was wondering why nobody had used it, yet. 
In general, how long does it take to get a user announcement approved and how do we know? I assume we just wait to see it show up as moved to the appropriate forum.
But while waiting, one always wonders if the message got posted correctly or if it got ate by some bug. In my case, the site had crashed (or so it seemed to me) on my first attempt to post. Several hours later I tried again. But now I wonder…
Thanks.
You should contact a moderator of that sub-forum. Currently, that is Ricky Q., Madison, Bharat Nain, Beth Sweet . Generally, you should give us 2-3 days before bugging us