Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20181129221531/@comment-26339491-20181213182119

Ursuul wrote: May I ask why it was baked into the feature, rather than making it a permissions-based restriction so that in obvious case-by-case situations, FANDOM might be able to produce more than one? Wouldn’t that allow for more flexible decision-making down the road? It would have taken quite a bit more time to implement, and the feature would have come out later, delaying other things that were lined up to be developed next.

Since we didn't think (and we still haven't seen any evidence to the opposite) that more than one Announcement at a time is necessary, we didn't invest extra time in building options to change this on a case-by-case basis.

Plus, as this thread shows, many communities switch to Announcements (if they switch at all) with the mindset that this is simply the replacement of forum highlights, but that doesn't do the feature justice.

Announcements differ from forum highlights in more ways than many users realize. Announcements are more visible, stay around longer (30 instead of 7 days) and are less restrictive in terms of content that they can point to. If you were to try and use them exactly like you did forum highlights, all you would notice are the restrictions (or rather, the restriction, because the "1 at a time" limit is the only one), and not take advantage of everythign that Announcements does better.

That doesn't mean that we think Announcements is perfect and has no room for improvement - it does. Before we do that, though, we want to first find out what users are really missing, and not just what they think they're missing before even giving Announcements a try.