Suggestion: Required Announcements

[f150guy]

Periodically, we will post announcements about new features or new rules that we would like to make required reading in specific forums.

How about a feature where we can flag certain announcements as "required" and if they are not read by the user, the user cannot post in the forum where the announcement appears until they do?

Did that make sense?

[JamesUS]

I like that :) very good idea.

[TommyBALL]

Like it a lot! :D

[eva2000]

Originally posted by f150guy
Periodically, we will post announcements about new features or new rules that we would like to make required reading in specific forums.

How about a feature where we can flag certain announcements as "required" and if they are not read by the user, the user cannot post in the forum where the announcement appears until they do?

Did that make sense? great idea... for important announcements right now i disable everyone's sigs and replace them with the link to the announcement in postbit where there sigs are meant to be ... :)

[Grover]

And what if a users doesn't logon to your forum in say....3 months and you put 8 announcements or something like that on it. Then they have to click through 8 announcements.......

I don't know......I don't like it when I get forced to do something to get access to something, in this case a thread.

Grover.

[orca]

May it would be better if that announcement would be a popup.

[f150guy]

The beauty of my suggestion is that requiring announcements to be read would be optional. If you did not want to flag an announcement as required reading, you wouldn't have to, so grover's scenario/downside would be moot. In our scenario, we would not flag every announcement as required, but there have been enough that we considered important enough that they should be read. Popups, IMHO, are way too intrusive and very often ignored or closed without being read. Additionally, there are too many "popup killer" applications that may snuff them.

Take for instance our Lightning Forum. (F150online is a site for Ford truck owners) One of our users has compiled a very extensive FAQ for this specific vehicle. We have created an announcement that has been "stuck" at the top of the forum. What we have found is that "newbies" tend to not read announcements (or more likely don't understand the concept yet). If a user is forced to read the announcement before being allowed to post in that forum, then the likelihood of duplicate or repeat posts decreases.

Another example...we have forums for coordinating Group Purchases. The rules on how to go about running these on our site are very strict and must be followed or threads are deleted. Like above, we have a "stuck" announcement about the rules, but we find that they are very often ignored. If we had an announcement that was required reading before posting in that forum, the excuse "I didn't see the rules" would not be valid. Once again, this does not hinder someone from reading any post in the forum.

Note that I am not proposing making announcements required reading for simply browsing through or reading the forums, rather before posting is allowed.