I’ve set it up our forum in exactly this way, but we haven’t used the Announcement category at all as we tend to rely on MailChimp blasts for the super, duper important stuff – though it might be time to revise this approach.
But I was asking something else: we end up having a lot of of single post topics when people (not just forum admins/mods) post announcements or share useful information which aren’t intended to stir up a conversation.
Single post topics have caused trouble for me in the past. At the time @codinghorror had commented:
We haven’t found a better way of handling things. We cross-post things on certain social media, but since we’re a closed community, we need to do a lot of things in private spaces.
Some ideas:
- auto-close these topics after X time – or even immediately after publication. (We don’t currently close topics automatically.)
- Create a topical topic (say, “Professional development opportunities”) and then post subsequent announcements in the same topic.
Does this make more sense now?
I’d like to hear how other are handling communication that is not a discussion within the context of Discourse.