People are going to miss the downtime announcement.

Not everyone uses, or knows of, the "New Posts" button, and I think a lot of people are going to miss the downtime notice for Monday that was just posted because SIX MINUTES after it was posted, Wilder posted an ad about how you can give SL as a gift.

So if someone views the forum front page and doesn't delve into the Announcements forums, come Monday, we'll see a lot of those, "Hey, the grid is down, was this planned?" posts.

Perhaps LL should put a ticker on all pages on the website, along the top, like CNN puts their breaking news stories, white on red, that announce things like downtime that affect everyone.

That way there's no confusion and even those people who don't come to the forums except to say, "Hey, the grid's down!" will see it.

Excellent idea, I agree

Me three Aaron - I saw that announcement and thought the same thing. Will see if we can repost the downtime one again.

Wilder

I think they need to split the Announcements forum into Social/PR Announcements and Technical Announcements.

I like the idea of a streaming news ticker. I'm partial because I brought it up before... putting the static display space at the top of this page I'm typing on to use.

I'm unable to find the previous posts I made about it... wish I could!

Plus, motion catches the eye. Human brains are very good at zooming into that.

Which is why every banner ad on the internet blinks. Personally it drives me nuts.
But I do like the idea of a ticker, especially for downtime or updates

Jush--it's a problem when there's overload, everything competing for your attention at once. Since the brain is so good at pattern recognition, you get psychologically-conditioned to tune those sorts of things out. (Clusters of LOUD.)

In this specific example, if the ticker was the only thing moving, and doing it gracefully and subtlely, it could work.

The front page has a dynamic webmap now, after all. More elements like this help the website feel alive.

I wasn't saying that I was against the ticker at all. I love the idea actually. And honestly the front page of secondlife.com isn't overloaded with blinking stuff, it's pleasant. Since there isn't an overload on bling, I am sure that a ticker would catch people's attention because of that.

My first statment was kind of a generalized statement about things blinking at me. I do web design as well and get tons of requests for blinking, animated everything. Too much blinging blinky stuff is a turn off with those surfing the internet. In this case a little ticker moving on the screen isn't going to make people exclaim "bah forget it, I am outta here"

There's a standard feature in vBulletin to add an announcement to one or multiple forums. Kinda makes sense that they should use that really. It will then appear at the top of the topic list in every forum (if they set it that way)

Maybe we can make it a big red announcement in all the forums?

Yeah... I totally know what you mean. I was just adding a little more context. I feel the same way as you do! =^_^=

Gah, why does SL *always* go down when I have the day off? I had wednesday off, but there was a update, then I have monday off, now it'll be down also! :-/

That's why we call you Nimrod.

*Cries* My name first me all too well!

Can we have the ticker say "Elva for Queen" every other frame I love subliminal stuffs

Don't forget you can also check the latest Announcements on the Community home page: http://secondlife.com/community/

OR get an rss feed of the announcements here: XML

I'm still hitting "new posts" and haven't come to the forum maintenance thread! And its been less than a day since I checked..Still at 200 messages, not sure how many left.

Is there any particular reason why you don't use the announcement facility that's built into the forum software? That would seem to be the most logical way to announce downtime, surely.

Plus it should be pink and green. Those colors really catch the eye.

Thats a great idea. I'd say on the home page at least would be nice. Being that downtime hits so often.
Or even when we first log in. (Something other than the load screen that zips by so I can only read half of it.)
Going to a forum page to see if any downtime is going on soon makes it a drag and not fun at all.