Board Thread:Community Announcements and Events/@comment-25356303-20180712180208

Hi all, Atvelonis here. Unless you caught my bad pun in the weekly update for 7/7/18, you will be delighted to learn that we're finally getting a useful feature from Wikia—announcements! This new tool will allow administrators  and  moderators  to highlight a thread using Wikia's new notification system, meaning it will be delivered to all active users on the wiki, even mobile users. Thus, we will finally begin to bridge the gap between the wiki's Forums and its Discussions.

With that said, announcements isn't just a Discussions feature. In fact, I've made the wiki's first announcement point to a forum thread (this one) to make this point abundantly clear. Staff members can use the feature to announce any URL on Wikia; a forum, blog, or /d post, or even an article. However, there are some differences between announcements and the wiki's current "highlight" tool.

Firstly, while highlighting a thread links it to every logged-in user on the site, announcements are only shown to users who have made an action (edit, upvote, or post) in the past 90 days. This ensures that users who stumble across the wiki but do not care about community matters will not be bothered by any announcements we make. Note that if a user makes their first action after an announcement is made, they still won't see that announcement, even if it has not expired yet.

The other big thing to keep in mind is that we can only have one announcement active at a time, and by default an announcement will last for 30 days. Fortunately, if we plan on making announcements more often than that (e.g. weekly updates), we can manually expire an announcement before 30 days have passed and just create a new one.

Just to clarify, the announcements tool has limitations for some mobile users. Every active user on the wiki or /d will receive notifications from it, as will mobile web users and anyone using the "FANDOM" app (iOS and Android). However, for users on the TESWiki-specific app, only those on Android will receive announcements notifications; iOS users are out of luck, and should use the consolidated "FANDOM" app instead.

We are part of an early adopter group for this feature, so if you encounter any issues with its implementation, please send Wikia Staff an email here. Thanks! 