News: Changes in Game Announcement Threads

[AlanH]

In order to limit the number of sticky threads in this forum, we have decided that, in future, there will only be one thread to cover the "Pre-game" and "Saves Available" functions for each game.

The Pregame thread will in future be named, "News: xOTM yy Pregame. Starts <date>". The GOTM 40 pregame thread title has already been changed to this format.

For some time, the first post in the Pregame thread has included a link to the GOTM web site release page which becomes valid once the game opens; along with a statement of the start date. That will continue to be the case, and you can use that information when you wish to start the game.

You can, of course, visit the GOTM web site home page at any time. Once the new game is started you will see it advertised on the right hand side of every page there, and a click on the image will take you to the game release page.

The game designer will normally post a reminder in the Pregame thread once the game is open, but this will not necessarily happen immediately.

 

[classical_hero]

I think that some stickies can be unstuck. It does look a mess this forum, with all the stickies. Surely they will be popular enough to not need to be stickied.

 

[AlanH]

Well, we are working on it as you can see from this announcement.

Stickies don't make the forum a mess; it's down to the sheer number of active or currently important threads. We typically have three active games plus one recently completed and one in its pre-game phase. That adds up to around 12 'live' threads, even with this change.

We also had some extra announcements recently, with several new Eptathlons, new staff, and now this. We *could* just make proper announcements that appear above the forum listing, linking to non-sticky threads. But they don't appear if you use the User CP as your default page and then jump straight to subscribed threads. I know that I have missed announcements myself in the past for this reason.

Game announcements and results threads don't always get a lot of traffic, and would drop out of site if they were not stuck for a couple of weeks until everyone has had time to see them.

Spoiler threads are usually more popular, and could possibly be unstuck ... but then they would come below the 'announcements' categories, which doesn't seem right.