Sorry, we alway post at:
https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature/announcements do you mind watching that category?
Regarding the idea of auto posting links to the “announcement” on meta, I am not sure I would like this default on, but maybe an opt in option for forum operators makes sense.
Well, I have an account there, but many members here do not.
How about a read only “mirror” of the meta.discourse Feature > Announcement category as a sub-category of each of your hosted forum’s Meta category ?
Wouldn’t this be easier to toggle ?
Perhaps but that likely also involves switching to the Categories page which I wish was my default landing page. (It still has a listing of Latest postings as well as the Category list.)
But being able to choose our own landing page is another feature request …
EDIT … and if choosing our own landing page were added, we wouldn’t know it because we don’t see announcements ! 
I edited a post today as normal…but i think you might be right about the category?
Hi Dan,
Historically what we found is that the type of people who are interested in an exhaustive change list for Discourse are exactly the type of people who like interacting with us on meta. A mirror category could introduce more noise and questions here.
That said if a community wants to clone a category off meta, I guess it is ok, there have been some experiments over the years with https://github.com/LeoMcA/discourse-rss-poster that allows you to post topics based off an RSS feed. To a degree our wordpress integration piece does it as well.
You miss the point. What we REALLY have been asking for in the simple COURTESY of being informed via some kind of announcement mechanism, of major feature changes or implementations, instead of being surprised when things just magically change.
Most (of those I’ve discussed this with,) don’t actually care about nitty detail change logs.
This was just throwing an idea out there, as perhaps an easy method. So then, it may not be so great an idea.
How about a monthly global PM perhaps outline / synopsis form of the functional changes ?
Basically heads up with links to more information.
What we had actually thought about in the past was a locked subcategory (of our local “Meta”) named “Announcements” where the forum admins would post no-reply notices of changes.
But Trimble staff just “passed the buck” onto you guys at Discourse. (Basically they didn’t have a dedicated community manager on staff for awhile, and didn’t have anyone to monitor Discourse for changes, and craft these notices.)
I imagine Discourse staff could also post global notices that would populate ALL said “Announcement” sub-categories on ALL of their hosted forums. Be it RSS feed … whatever, we members don’t care how it’s implemented.
The bottom line is what people have said is that implementing changes without some notice makes users feel disrespected, or user’s have the feeling that the forum operation is not well maintained. I know you will disagree because you have more information with regard to Discourse maintenance, however WE don’t see any PR presence that promotes the forum maintenance and improvements. When things change it is always a surprise.
I understand, and I hear you.
Stuff has been reasonably quiet on large scale changes for almost a year, and suddenly in a of month we have
All of these are very interesting and important changes, I guess this is somewhat surprising to people who have been using our forums for many years cause this is not the amount of change you would expect from a product that is 6 years old.
I am going to assign to one of our internal community managers to read through this topic carefully, summarise it on our dev instance and we will brainstorm any improvements we can make.
That said, please keep in mind, this has been an outlier month, in general this level of change does not happen so quickly. Also … from a cadence perspective coordinating the announcements with deploys on the 1500 sites we host which we deploy at different times is somewhat tricky.
We have to be careful not to be overly reactive here.
I’ve been holding back a bit, but I think it’s time to chime in.
I too have a Discourse Meta membership, but my experience there hasn’t been great. Whether correct or not, I perceive a bias towards Discourse administers and developers - the people who are purely users of Discourse based forums don’t get much respect. Consequently, I spend little time on Discourse Meta.
And I’m fairly sure the bulk of the users of THIS forum aren’t even aware that Discourse Meta exists and, even if they were, it wouldn’t interest them.
As far as the announcements go, the pure users deserve some sort of “here’s what’s changed” announcement. And I’m sure you have a lot of other Discourse instances you host where the contracting company either whose Community Manager(s) doen’t have time to make those sorts of announcements, or who leave essentially all administration to you. It’s the users of these Discourse instances who, I think, would most appreciate announcements - especially of visible changes to the US. The details of how you implement it aren’t important to us - just that we get the “heads up”.