Ok, here are my thoughts and suggestions for redesign of the system:
General Observations and Thoughts
- There are some special use cases for site-wide announcements that should be prominently shown everywhere (including during a game) and difficult to overlook. These should be reserved for important, urgent information, like server issues or imminent downtime.
- There are general announcements that are not critically important, but may be timely (e.g, like a live event starting). This suggests a desire to notify users (on whatever page they are on), but probably do not require a very prominent notification that could interrupt something.
- There are non-urgent announcements that people should be aware of, but they do not require immediate attention. For example, promoting a future event, forum post, or book release.
- There are events that require several links to be promoted. For example, a tournament relay could have multiple demo boards and live streams running concurrently that would need to be promoted.
Maybe some other categories of use cases could be thought of (please reply with suggestions if you have any), but I think the first three items in this list captures three broad categories of notifications, that could be addressed with different levels of prominence in the UI. The fourth item has overlap with the second and third categories (depending on if the event is currently live or something still in the future), but I wanted to highlight that use case, since I think both policy and design considerations need to be made to address that in particular.
I think these three categories should use different types of notifications:
- For the urgent, important announcements of the first category, some sort of notification that appears on every page (even in game) seems warranted. These should only be used very sparingly, and perhaps should only be accessible to the developer and moderators. In this case, perhaps it’s even okay to have the current style of UI-blocking pop-up (or at least until something better is designed, like an element that displaces rather than overlaps with others, as suggested by @BHydden). This type of notification would also generate the banner announcement on the main and games pages.
- For the time-sensitive, but less important, announcements, like a streamer going live, I think these should not trigger a pop-up. However, instead, these could perhaps generate a notification inside the drop-down notification menu. Maybe even, instead of incrementing the blue counter number (which is used for things like game invites), these could increment a separate counter with a different color, so that people realize that the notification hidden by the drop-down menu is something different than just an invite. Like is currently the case, semi-trusted users (like prominent streamers) could be given access to this channel.
- For the category of general, non-urgent announcements, I think simply just the banner on the main and games pages are enough, and no pop-up/drop-down notification is needed. While this type of announcement is the least intrusive, it is still a prominent side-wide announcement that could be viewed as a form of endorsement or even advertising (depending on the content), so there should be careful consideration about what type of content should be promoted.
For the fourth item about tournaments, I just want to reemphasize my earlier posts in this thread, where I suggest that this type of promotion could be better organized with consolidation of the information and links via some webpage and/or forum post. Instead of promoting each link individually with its own separate notification, I think it would be better to promote the organizing page/forum post instead.