hi,

so i've always seen the announcement forums as a place for updates about scratch to be shared, but recently it's being used to tell us about world issues, politics, and recently fact checking.

don't get me wrong, i know and understand how important these things can be especially on a place like scratch where we are fortunate to be able to speak freely about our opinions, but do they really have to be shared in the announcement forums?

i check that category once in a while to see updates about scratch (many users don't know this but scratch updates a ton of small things quite often, which should be in the announcements category but that's another suggestion), and the community such as wiki wednesday or policy changes.

i propose a new section for non-scratch but still scratch related announcements, or if djangobb supports nested categories, a section of the announcement forums should go towards the non-scratch announcements

this would keep the announcements a lot more streamlined and make things a little more organized.

pros:
- streamlined
- organized

cons:
- the information might reach less people

that could be addressed by continuing to send the announcements through the tumblr blog which is shown on the front page.

if nested categories don't exist, and making a new category for the announcements might be too much hassle for what it's worth, the non-scratch announcements could go in their own little topic, so then people can follow that and get messages whenever new updates come in. (this would only work if the thread is closed, otherwise people following would get spammed, but closing the thread is fairly common with the current non-scratch announcements so blocking discussion isn't really a worry)

so that's basically it, what do you guys think?

thnks for comnig to my ted tlak adn i hope to see youre thougts

I fail to understand why such topics don't belong in Announcements. They are certainly relevant to Scratch and are deemed necessary to post, as you agree. Making a new forum for this would just split things up and, as you say, possibly reach less people. In fact I would go so far as to say that splitting them up would make things less streamlined and less organized.

Za-Chary wrote:

I fail to understand why such topics don't belong in Announcements. They are certainly relevant to Scratch and are deemed necessary to post, as you agree. Making a new forum for this would just split things up and, as you say, possibly reach less people. In fact I would go so far as to say that splitting them up would make things less streamlined and less organized.

you've got a point, perhaps this wouldn't be the best solution but it's currently a bit disorganized with announcements from different categories kind-of thrown into a mix altogether.

Jeffalo wrote:

it's currently a bit disorganized with announcements from different categories kind-of thrown into a mix altogether.

I still disagree with this. It kind of sounds similar to how someone might claim that “The Suggestions forum should be split up into ‘Suggestions for the editor’ and ‘Suggestions for the website’ to keep things organized.” I mean, yeah, I guess you could organize it like that, but I wouldn't necessarily say it would make it “more organized.”

I think this is a good idea because it seems strange when many of the announcements aren't related to Scratch at all! I like to look at announcements to find bug fixes and things like that, so it's confusing when there are random announcements in there too