In rare occasions I want to address the entire community by using a mention in a new topic, or refer to them in a message. AFAIK this then should be done like this:
Dear @trust_level_0 community,
We have an important announcement for you …
Now to a person not knowing about trust levels this communicates as “Dear [I don’t trust you] community”, and people indeed misunderstand the trust-level mention. So I add something to the announcement between parentheses as “(trust_level_0 is how in Discourse one sends a message to everyone)”.
But maybe there’s another way to avoid this, that I am unaware of. Is there?
If that’s not the case, and the above is the proper way to do this, then a nice feature may be to be able to specify an alias:
Using a mention to broadcast this information is not ideal.
A possible alternative is creating an announcement category and just just having everyone watch the first post on it.
That said, does this really warrant the swarm of emails this would generate? A far less intrusive option is just to pin or banner something for a few weeks.
I agree this should be used very sparingly. In our case it is about repositioning part of the community, and it would include revamping our website (which some now inactive members contributed to). So a major announcement. The mechanism is an admin-only action, who must be aware of the consequences (i.e. swarm of emails).