I think that’s a good goal, but you hit the nail on the head, the home page isn’t enough. About 50% of our players (correspondence players namely) visit the home page regularly, but the other 50% hardly ever go there because there’s nothing there for them, they go directly to the Play page instead. I think most would agree that the current implementation of the notifications on the home screen would be a bad fit for the Play page, so I think if we want to relegate ongoing game and stream banners to those pages we need to rethink how they’re displayed on those two places, or in some other way that’s not so obtrusive.
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Is it possible to simply remove them from the home page where the top middle notifications for the job? I guess not otherwise we’d already have done that I suppose.
Could this be done by some kind of automation whereby if you’re on the front page anything that pops up top right is just dismissed for you? The effect being that if you navigate to the home page the top right thingies disappear.
Or, have a special category for announcements that are actually important “server going offline in 5 minutes” or whatever and only those pop up. The others get a little notification icon instead.
Sorry if these are old suggestions, I’ve not re-read everything above.
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I mean, yes, but I think that doesn’t go far enough for the general complaint / observation that having 6 giant banners popping up on games isn’t great
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Could it appear on the watch page? And if you are elsewhere, a number indicator appears next to “Watch” so that you are aware that some games are broadcasted?
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I think I’m still unclear as to why they must pop up at all. It seems to be that having the top middle thingy is enough. And it could appear in the same place on home, play, learn and watch pages. They might add a bit of scrolling out something but being dismissable and not covering things up that feels liveable with.
Can it be that only announcements posted by you, anoek, ever pop up?
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I’m in general agreement that the boards and stream announcements don’t need to and probably shouldn’t given the volume these days.
I don’t think the current widget for displaying the ongoing announcements on the home page is very good, and smashing that on top of the play / watch pages just replicates the not very good experience, I would claim reducing the quality of those pages. If we’re going to take action on this, I’d like something that generally improves things, not just taking something ugly that floats on the right and replacing it with something ugly in the center.
Now, filtering out non system update announcements on the game and review page, that’s probably something that should be done regardless of any other ui/ux change… but if we want to improve the experience beyond that, seems like it should be more than just swapping one junky thing for another.
To me it would improve things since the junky thing in the centre doesn’t hide stuff like the floating junky thing on the right.
I guess the question for me is could this easily be done while figuring out what a more significant improvement would be. I’d take the small improvement if it’s easy to do!
Maybe you can’t polish a turd but you can at least move the turd to less annoying place!
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The front end is open source on GitHub, and all the devs openly admit UI/UX is not any of our strong suits… so do feel free to PR a better option 
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Does the watch page have lots of visitors?
Does the Stream TV notification thingy get clicked enough?
If so, then people who are interested in the streaming/tournament announcements can be gently redirected to those pages.
I would probably add a special place on the Watch page with games that are tournament, like how the group games are shown separately in group pages.
Also, I think a calendar integration would be a good next step (some time in the future). It would be better for me to know tomorrow afternoonish there will be 6 boards from a tournament on OGS, than have 6 top right notifications pop up out of the blue while I’m playing.
That’s general ideas though, I notoriously don’t know how to github.
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Announcements could perhaps be displayed by some small notification icon with a number, similar to the TV thingy and what you also have in the top right on Facebook and Youtube, which drops down a scrollable list of items when you click it.
That sort of thing doesn’t seem too intrusive.
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It would also be helpful if we had a single notification “Lanke Cup Pro Qualification R4” which brings us to a page with multiple demos, so that if we want to dismiss the notification, a single click is enough.
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All this could go into the watch tab. And then there is something extraordinary it would be enough to highlight the watch tab selector.
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Note that a PR is not even required, just a design that gets concensus.
Showing us “screens that look ugly” is a nice way to start a conversation, but something will only get done when there’s a candidate design that fixes it which anoek agrees with.
Since the (recent) OP is UI designer, I look forward to that with hope. It’s fair for me to say this, because I’m likely (better than 50/50?) the one who’ll implement it 
(FYI here is the most recent example of how it worked).
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I don’t know if the current design aims at giving announcements more exposure, but with me the usual result is that I instablock any announcer as soon as they announce something.
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What counts as concensus? This one seems pretty good:
It doesn’t even require a new entry to the icon bar!
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The thing is we already have an announcement preferences section which shows the announcement history table.
There is a kind of place for announcements there available to everyone.
We could then for example, imagine just turning that into a page for everyone, which on the one hand shows current announcements (extract that element from the home page), and then history underneath (extract that from the preference page).
So you make a page called announcements and it might look like (in pieces)
and where ever it goes (Community or watch) it can have a little indicator
or
whichever makes more sense.
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With me, I’ve just disabled all such notifications. While the design might be meant to give these things more prominence, it may actually encourage many people to ignore them altogether out of annoyance.
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This has been said earlier in the thread, and I’ve advocated for it before, but I will again suggest the following policy proposal.
One announcement per event
Instead of the current practice of a separate announcement for each linked game, commentary stream, etc., the event organizer(s) should place all of these links in a single place (such as a forums thread or external website), and just use a single announcement to point to that.
Note that this is purely an operating policy change, and requires no changes to the code, but just how we use the current system. Of course, in the long-term, I do believe that other code/system changes should be made as well, but those may require further design and discussion. In the meantime, I believe that the site experience can be improved by adopting the above policy.
Should we adopt the “one announcement per event” policy?
- Yes
- No
0
voters
Frankly, most of these events are probably only interesting to a small fraction of OGS users. Announcements are quite intrusive, as they block the rest of the UI, are redundant with the banners on the homepage, and have to be dismissed individually. Thus, I think that they should be used sparingly.
I think this is consensual, but it does add a workload to police it. That said, I assume there’s already some policing required around notifications anyway.
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