I think the workload to implement this policy would be quite small, and even the community could help out.
For example, if someone saw an announcer continue to post multiple links to an event, they could send a private message to politely and gently remind them that they should consolidate their links and use just a single announcement. This was actually already done (by a member of the community making a suggestion) for the current, ongoing event mentioned above.
The pool of announcers is relatively small, and they are motivated to behave well (spam is not good for the event organizer either)
However, i do think we could get ahead of this by adding some guidance about multi-game events in the Announcement Center (or at least put the guidance in a wiki or forum post and link to it)
I just saw the post on the forums about the European Pro Qualification. I was thinking maybe it would be good if we could combine the post on the forum and the announcement. For example, one consolidated post can be created on the forum and automatically announced on the main page. Otherwise, announcing manually with the link probably works too.
I’m happy to do it—I just figured talking about what’s better is probably warranted.
Design by committee is always a hard task, as solutions seldom live in a vacuum as the “perfect one”.
I think my UI background would tell me that swaths of notifications—some wanted and some unwanted—should never be UI-blocking. As such the most natural place is to put them up here in the notification menu, which appears to be ready and waiting.
I think the problem we keep hitting (in general, but definitely with this issue) is that when one iterative solution is proposed it’s seen as a device that “opens a can of worms” so we get stuck with analysis paralysis instead of fixing broken things. Is it the end-all perfect solution to put all these notifications hidden behind the little bell icon? I suppose that’s debatable. Is it better than spamming functional parts of some of our most-used screens? Absolutely.
I propose we tuck all these notifications in the menu for now. Other discussions can follow.
Also wouldn’t take a whole lot of lines of code to just extract the existing components to a new page.
A new page doesn’t really address the issue at hand:
Creating a new Announcements page would have the same problem as putting them (only) on the Home page.
The popup could disappear after 2 seconds, so that we are aware that we have to go to the Watch page.
And if most users don’t want to see the announcements?
Because a lot of people don’t want to see almost any announcements except server notifications for maintenance etc.
Very different.
The home page is bad, because half or more people don’t even use it, like if you don’t play correspondence. It also has no indication in the name or otherwise it has anything to do with announcements (or pending challenges for that matter)
However anyone interested will check the “announcement page” if there’s a number indicating a new or better “active” announcement. I don’t need to know I missed 50 announcements, just that there are 3 active now.
I wouldn’t want this. 2 seconds isn’t enough to read any text, and the watch page is just as bad as the home page really.
I prefer an announcements page.
Maybe there’s another solution.
I’m interested in those notifications, I just wish they were not so intrusive.
If I had to go to a specific page to see them, I’d never see them. This doesn’t work at all from my perspective.
Notifications need to be visible even if you’re not looking for them (unless voluntarily disabled), that’s the whole point. They should just not obscure the rest of the UI in the process.
One could think of putting it on the OGS logo itself
Already it links to the home page, where the notifications already are.
Server notifications need to be visible, like the site is undergoing maintenance. I don’t think stream and even notifications have to be visible anywhere they cover other UI. If they’re visible in a menu, it’s not that bad.
(I think I still prefer a page for it but the homepage icon might be good enough.)
If they have to be seen, let’s cover the full page when arriving. Now I agree for this for server or OGS announcements but not for others like tournaments reports or streaming. These can go in a specific tab like said (including the home one I think it’s a good idea too)
From a branding standpoint I think this is a terrible idea. I like the function driven design, but that’s not the right thing to do to the OGS logo.
Frankly, while I personally fully support Ukraine, I found myself wondering if these colors were to become our permanent logo colors. Might be a thing for another forum topic.
I thought we were going to be able to revert on Jan 21 … I’m sure someone said that 
It’s hard to read between the lines and get the proper subtext of what’s really going on in a forum format here, but it sounds to me like:
Can anyone articulate for me that these two things aren’t the things causing a divide that we can’t seem to bridge in order to move forward with improvements?
If this is indeed the issue, I propose a compromise so we can fix the really broken parts. Let’s try this:
Pertinent notifications could be:
) because they’re interested in seeing them be front-and-center.This way we’re properly using the notifications icon/menu for what it should be used for, we’re allowing for certain high-priority messages to be displayed if needed, and we’re unblocking the top right area from ever being covered by the notifications.
Can we possibly try to rally around an idea like this? Looking for enough agreement that we can get this issue off of the discussion slab and into a working draft. Who do we need to bless such an idea in order to move forward? Does it need X number of likes? Does it need a dev willing to PR it? Does it need certain admins to agree? All of the above?
I appreciate everyone’s time considering it. 
(1) and (2) sound clear and relatively uncontroversial - a good start. I’m having a little trouble telling what (3) entails.
Anyway, I’m happy to support (1) and (2). Unclear about (3) but not necessarily against it.
Literally just @anoek 
He usually looks for some form of community support, but it’s probably a mix of that and personal judgement, so no specific X likes/votes.
I mean… this always helps…
I think you can mock up all kinds of PRs but I got the feeling that it’s not necessarily helpful unless
some boxes being checked.
I think it was a fairly simple & useful idea to put the automatch on the homepage also, for people that don’t play correspondence, but the issue was that it also didn’t really look very far ahead, and it’s just a temporary update to what might need to be a big overhaul.
We had the play page and the automatch revamped recently
For item 3 I do mean the top center area of the home page (above the “Active Games” heading).
I think we need to make that a tailor-able space where users can easily choose what kinds of notifications show up there. Personally I’d like an opt-in model so we’re not signing new users up for a seeming spam-fight on day one. However, I also recognize that not everyone likes the idea of an opt-in model because those notifications are largely advertising (and not many would opt in to advertising). If instead we went with an opt-out model (as we currently have) we should just make sure it’s very clear and easy for users to get to the settings panel where they can opt out of all of those messages. Think like a useful “unsubscribe from all emails” page when you click the unsubscribe link in an email.
I’m pretty indifferent as to if the top-center notifications should be site-wide or just on the Home page, as I personally would have them just all turned off right away. However, if I were to get into the weeds about it I’d say: if the point is to use those notifications as either advertising or for truly important server messages then we should have them visible on all pages. Whether for advertising or critical server communications they’d just be more effective that way. However, since I plan to turn off everything I can in that space I personally wouldn’t advise expanding their presence unless we’re first very sure it’s easy to tailor which items appear there. Making sense?
If I’m not seeing any big resistance (in particular from @anoek) here, I’ll turn this above discussion into acceptance criteria on our long-standing Github issue.
Then, of course, I’d be happy to try to write the code to make it so—but I’m far less experienced in the ways of writing these features well so I expect I’d need at least some generous code review.
More than happy to help get you started and reviewed!
