I realised that the announcements do not appear in the top right corner anymore and only appear on the home page?
Maybe I missed the announcement regarding this change, but this seems to defeat the purpose of the “announcement” as not many players will be staring at the home page.
No comments? Nobody is concerned about how announcements function on OGS?
I assume others dont mind the change as much as we do.
Yeah, it’s not an announcement anymore if it’s just on the homepage… It’s more like just a notice.
i also liked it better with the popups.
i couldn’t find any direct info about the change, but i gathered that a) some people found the announcements intrusive, and b) there were some hard to fix technical issues. see Intrusive game notifications
what i consider even more unfortunate (and easier to fix): when i am not logged in, i don’t see the announcements even on the homepage. in fact i haven’t figured how to find them at all. quite annoying when i want to just quickly check broadcasts on my phone. i propose to include them for the anonymous users too.
Well in what I find to be a rather hillarious irony, the info about announcments changing was announced in the home screen announcement, that nobody ever sees 
You can find it under community > what’s new:
I think the presumed majority of users found the little “pop-ups” intrusive as more people tend to want to play than to watch, although I kind of miss them too.
On the off chance somebody did not know, we list active streams under the little screen icon in the upper right if those are the announcements you miss the most, but at the moment it is also only visible to logged in users, and those do not include high-profile games that are being played and not streamed 
.
That is my long way of saying that I too find the current solution sub-optimal and kind detrimental to growing interest in high profile games, kibitz culture, and commentaries, but it will probably not be easily changed. Though I think high profile games (even without streams) should at least be included in the gotv page 
to at least try and gather spectators.
thank you very much for the additional info and insights!
at the moment i am lobbying mostly for the announcements visible for guests. it is what actually bothers me and i don’t see a reason why not to make them accessible to everyone. i think it is more of an oversight than an intention
regarding the popups:
i respect the majority opinion, but i also consider it beneficial to voice my support to the alternative.
it doesn’t actually bother me much as a spectator, because i don’t use announcements to learn that a game is being played.
but the low spectator numbers are demotivating when setting up and running a broadcast.
and i believe a future ideal solution could satisfy both sides - a UX visible enough from any view for the interested and unobtrusive for the rest. it could be similar to notifications here at the forum or elsewhere
Exactly my thoughts. What about an unobtrusive, always gray icon next to the group messages icon in the top right:
It could even have a number of active notifications below, but the icon never becomes green/active/highlighted. Readily available if one is looking for it, but remains in the background otherwise. Or simply using the bell icon, but without ever highlighting it.
On second thought, the issue might be simply that notifications are not sent out enough? Oftentimes there are tournaments without a notification until someone DMs a mod who then has to manually add the games/relays to the events list (then visible on the Home page, but not for instance on the Chat page).
In the spirit of the recent Community Moderators, would it make sense then to have a similar role - a new category of select users who could add links to OGS games and events and external links relevant for the current day, with a possible intermediate steps of actual moderator approval, to increase the “ambient awareness” when logged in to the server?
. . .
Edit to add: case in point, there are this morning two evented games (visible in the home), and yet the bell shows 0 under the icon, where I would expect to see “2”. Should the bell icon be reserved for site announcements, then I would love to have a separate “evented games” icon that would show “2” under it.
Yes I think that bell icon can be used for site announcements too
