it certainly did 
Hahaha well thats a bit embarrassing 
…why?
I’m clearly missing something here haha, I see the announcements but have no idea what would be embarrassing about them?
Just a joke. I’m out of the loop myself. Maybe some misspelled announcements?
Could we just get rid of the pop-up announcements altogether? I mean the ones in the top-right that block the UI and need to be cleared with the “X” button. For some types of announcements, it seems that the banner on the top of the front page would be enough. For other types of announcements, maybe it would better to just instead put them in the notifications drop-down menu (like the kind you get when you are invited to a game, which causes a blue number to appear over your avatar).
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As mentioned above, something more substantial as you desire is still in the works, this is just a little QoL improvement. 
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I’ve seen that thread and understand that a large revamp is in the works, but it remains somewhat unclear what the planned design directions will be.
What I desire is simply to get rid of the pop-up notifications. Is that part of the plan? Or is that design choice uncertain at this point?
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Everything is on the table. They probably won’t completely disappear, but revert back to their initial intention, that being just site-wide announcements for things like server outages. But decisions on all those matters, what announcements we need / want, and what is the best way to implement each, is still being made.
Just to be clear (for everyone else reading this, since I’m sure @BHydden already understands what I’m talking about), my proposal is to get rid of the pop-up notifications, which are the floating notifications shown in the following screenshots:
In the above screenshot, the pop-up notification on the homepage blocks the duplicate announcement in the banner.
When viewing a game, these pop-ups even block parts of the clock and board.
Using pop-ups for these type of announcements (as shown in the screenshots) seems both redundant with the sitewide banners and appears unnecessary since they are not urgent information.
On the other hand, @BHydden highlights a particular use case:
@BHydden, are you suggesting these type of announcements should still generate these type of pop-ups? Do you think there are other use cases where a pop-up is warranted?
As an alternative, for the potentially more urgent and important announcements, my suggestion would be to instead use the drop-down notification menu (the kind that you get one you are invited to a game, and a blue counting number shows up on your avatar in the top-right).
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Heh I liked your comment there. I think those need to go too. I think they need to stay somewhere though since a lot of time is spent off the homepage.
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Honestly, I haven’t given it a lot of thought.
Critical information should not be hidden behind a drop-down menu. I think anoek agrees with me (or rather, I agree with him) on this matter.
“I saw it and found it annoying” is preferable over “I needed to be aware of this and did not see the information in a timely manner”
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Maybe these could be site-wide embedded in-line at the top of the page rather than on top of other elements, this way they would only push other important info further down the page rather than hiding it completely. (they would obviously still be dismissable
Edit: Importantly, this would only be AFTER only critical updates are displayed this way, this would be atrocious in the way we are currently abusing the system to convey all announcements.
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Honestly, I’m fine with “servers running slow” notifications staying where they are, but right now everything is a popup, and it really doesn’t need to be
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Yep I think everyone agrees with this, the issue is the time and UI / UX design experience required to actually change it to something better.
If the purpose of the pop-ups are to deliver important information that should not be ignored, then I think (as you noted earlier) the current is far overused with non-important, non-urgent promotion, which may actually have the detrimental effect of conditioning people to ignore these pop-ups and reflexively dismissive them in batches.
These announcements should be reserved for actual important cases, and having promotions for various streamers, tournament game relays, books, etc. degrades the system and experience.
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In an ideal world you are 100% correct. With our current system, we are torn between including non-critical announcements in the critical announcements section, or not promoting streams and events AT ALL.
We have obviously chosen the former, both sides have positives and negatives, and ideally we would like to upgrade the system such that this choice is not required. This is not an easy dream to achieve.
anoek has admitted several times in the past that UI / UX is not his strong suit… so in this area he either needs to commit ludicrous amounts of time to slugging through the issue, or else is reliant on sporadic and inconsistent contributions from PRs on GitHub as UI / UX gifted volunteers happen to come along with time and will to donate.
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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.
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Whole-heartedly on board with (1), (2), and (4). For (3), I am half-heartedly on-board 
. I wouldn’t mind getting notifications like “Sign up for the upcoming Go Congress” in the dropdown notifications.
EDIT: And just to make a logistics comment, treating all non-system announcements the same is much easier than making announcers choose between urgent and non-urgent. If the distinction is important, then I know it can be done, but just something to be aware of.
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