New FrontPage Coordination System

**Aradan** · July 09, 2009, 07:37 PM

Attention Mod leaders and PR!

Until recently, for a FrontPage announcement to occur you had to PM someone with your announcement (or just image, date, text, and links, which would then be properly formatted as one). This could be a precarious business at times, especially if the person you PM’ed your announcement to happened to be on vacation. But now you may request to join the Mod Team PR/Leaders group that will give you access to a hidden ‘Coordination’ forum in the FrontPage section of the site, where you will be able to post your announcements, without the need to wait for a specific Staff member to read their PMs, edit it, ask for a specific announcement time etc. Any member with FP-posting rights (admins, FP contributors) can then copy your announcement from the Coordination forum to the public forum.

If you’d be interested in using this resource to help coordinate your FP request for your modification we’ll need a few details from you:

A link to your hosted forum, or if a mini-mod, your thread.
The name of the person who will be given posting rights in the hidden forum. This can be a mod leader or the dedicated PR man.

Things to note:

Only one person per modding team will be allowed to post in the hidden forum.
All FP posts in the hidden forum must include (just as before) all material to be posted on the FP, links, images, and concise details, all properly formatted. We will not design images or create your text for you!
Please include the date when your FP announcement may/should be posted.
The posts that you make in this hidden forum are to reserve a place on the FP only. They will not be posted to the FP by your actions; staff will still need to post the announcements.
The ToS still applies in the hidden forum.

If you have any questions, please post them here!

Applications for access to the forum should be PMd to Aradan.

**Augustus Lucifer** · July 09, 2009, 07:41 PM

I'd consider maybe naming the group something that has Frontpage in it.

**Aradan** · July 09, 2009, 07:47 PM

Already renamed.

**SigniferOne** · July 10, 2009, 07:41 AM

Neat, sent.

**MasterOfNone** · July 10, 2009, 09:08 AM

Would it be a good idea to make the announcements "read only" (i.e. closed) with the link to the review/preview/release being the place to confine comments?

**alpaca** · July 10, 2009, 10:43 AM

Could somebody from the tech deparment have a look at the banner rotation and maybe make it random?

**Aradan** · July 10, 2009, 05:02 PM

Originally Posted by MasterOfNone

Would it be a good idea to make the announcements "read only" (i.e. closed) with the link to the review/preview/release being the place to confine comments?

Hm, what would the benefits be?

Originally Posted by alpaca

Could somebody from the tech department have a look at the banner rotation and maybe make it random?

Would be nice, but is somewhat irrelevant to this thread... Jones King was working on a FP slide admin that was supposed to make our lives easier (not having to directly edit php files and upload to the ftp), but he's AWOL atm.

**alpaca** · July 10, 2009, 05:12 PM

Originally Posted by Aradan

Would be nice, but is somewhat irrelevant to this thread... Jones King was working on a FP slide admin that was supposed to make our lives easier (not having to directly edit php files and upload to the ftp), but he's AWOL atm.

Yes, I apologise. It came to my mind again just then

As for the new organisation: I wholeheartedly support it but could you allow more than one person per mod? I don't see how it would hurt to give access to all dev group members for mods (which would also mean less organisational work for you) and delete any superfluous threads.

**Aradan** · July 10, 2009, 05:16 PM

Currently we have set forum permissions in such a way that people can only see their own posts, so that releases are kept 'secret' until actually posted or for whatever other reasons a team would like to keep their announcement under wraps until the last moment. If we allow more than 1 people from 1 team, we will have to remove this. Also, unless we allow people to be able to edit other people's threads, multiple people per team will mean multiple posts, as edits of your team-mates' posts won't be possible.

**MasterOfNone** · July 10, 2009, 06:26 PM

#1 it would keep announcements in chronological order of "release"

#2 it would stop fanboys from bumping their mod's announcement thread (though this has lessened since the new forum structure effectively buried the one-forum FP set up)

#3 it would always show the most recent post in the parent forums, thus preventing people from going to old threads thinking they are new announcements

#4 it would keep comments to the mod forum rather than split between the FP and relevant thread in the mod's forum