Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-7981828-20130512212330/@comment-188432-20130714171332

You are a bit mistaken. Highlighting doesn't create a "popup warning". It illuminates a red symbol that appears over the speech balloons in the upper right hand corner. People then click on that "red alert", and a list of all currently unread, highlighted messages appears. In order to get rid of the red alert, people have to either proceed to the message or click the "mark all as read" button.

Stickying alerts no one, and is only visible if you happen to stroll by the index page.

Stickying is flatly not possible with the new forum, and really, it's not necessary. If you want to achieve the same effect as sticking, simply make it clear that a board is for admin announcements only. Make your announcements, and then immediately close them to editing. Then they'll be "caught in amber" at the top of the threads.

You may have to delete extraneous threads that people mistakenly place on that board, but it's no big deal to create and keep an "only admin can post" board.

I think you're also misunderstanding the basic flow of user interaction with the new forums. With the old tech, you pretty much had to go to an index. Now there are multiple avenues of interaction. People go to specific threads a whole lot more than they go to the Board index page. People get to threads because of the Recent Forum Activity module or because of their message alert.

It took me a while to figure out, but really people often bypass the list of threads. This new software encourages people to go to only the thread they want. If you want people to really see a message, you have to bolt it with javacript to a part of the typical thread page layout. Trying to recreate the exact functionality of stickying just ain't gonna get your message out. You have to leave that behind and try to find a way to do what you want using the tools that are there.