User blog:BertH/Introducing Announcements, a new way to notify your community

Today, all communities have a new tool available to use: Announcements. This tool directs all recently active members of the community to a specific page or post via a notification.

A powerful method of broadcast
Announcements is a replacement for both Forum’s ‘highlight’ function and Community Messages. Those older features require a recipient to visit the community in order to see a notice. With Announcements, the notification is delivered to the recipient no matter where they are on FANDOM.

Announcements notifications are sent to users on both the wiki and Discussions if they have contributed to either in the last 90 days. The notices are delivered via the notifications system currently used by Discussions, and will be displayed on mobile browsers. Very soon, Announcement alerts will also be present inside FANDOM's mobile apps, making this a truly comprehensive way to get the word out to users no matter how they access your community.

Simple and versatile
The Announcements management page is linked from Admin Dashboard and is available to admins and Discussions moderators. The management page shows information about the current announcement as well as the past 30 announcements created for the community.

A community can only have one announcement active at a given time. This helps to avoid overwhelming users who may be active in multiple communities. If an admin or moderator needs to notify users about multiple updates, Announcements can let everyone know when a “News” page is updated or when a weekly blog gets posted.

Announcements is independent from other features, meaning it’s not tied to Discussions or Forum. More details can be found on the help page. As your community experiments with the best ways to use Announcements, be sure to share your experiences with us here!