# How to handle announcements

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-handle-announcements/49390>\
**Category:** Community Building\
**Created:** [2016年八月29日 15:44 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-handle-announcements/49390 "2016-08-29T15:44:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![alehandrof](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/alehandrof/32/119526_2.png) [@alehandrof](https://meta.discourse.org/u/alehandrof)\
**Post date:** [2016年九月1日 16:05 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-handle-announcements/49390/6 "2016-09-01T16:05:22Z")

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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:

> [@Editing a single post topic should not count as activity](https://meta.discourse.org/t/editing-a-single-post-topic-should-not-count-as-activity/24961/4):
>
> This only happens if your “topic” only has a single post. It is considered an edit to the “last post” which does bump a topic. So it is kind of a specialized problem – why do you have so many topics that only have a single post? That’d be my first question, discussion topics consisting of a single post are not much of a discussion wink

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.

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