About the "Announcements" Channel in the SRB2 Discord

Edit #2: I kept the original bolded text for replies in this thread to make sense, but what I was trying to say was that if #announcements was for announcements related to the Server and SRB2, why were things that were seemingly unrelated to it also posted in the channel? what I really wanted was an easier way to get notified about specific content posted in #announcements (like the OLDC and Prerelease roles already instated).

Straight to the point: why are mod releases and/or moderator conversations (things unrelated to SRB2 itself) posted into
#announcements??

(I use discord terms to not cause ambiguity about what I'm talking about)

The tag describes the channel as: "Server and SRB2 Announcements". And as I (and probably plenty of other people) follow SRB2 news closely, I like to get pinged for when announcements drop.
But, sometimes, things unrelated to SRB2 itself or the server are posted here. Sometimes it's holiday and birthday celebrations, which I'm fine with, but other times it's mod releases or random comments made by moderators of the server, which have nothing to do with SRB2 itself.

Others have said that the developers have the right to post what they want, or that I shouldn't follow the channel and follow #development, but only #announcements posts things about the Master Server crashing, or a developer getting into rough circumstances, while #development only posts about, well developments to the game.
Also, #announcements rarely, if at all, ping @everyone. Even when the Master Server needed to be replaced (which took almost a week), @everyone wasn't used, so your only choice was to follow the channel.

Another problem I have are the videos posted onto the channel. Both with the Chaotix and Dr. Stephen's mod releases, the names for the videos caused confusion. In particular the "SRB2: New Content Approaches!" name is vague enough that you might think it's a content update for SRB2 itself, but it actually being a mod release. You could say that because it wasn't posted by the STjr official channel that we should've known better, but again, it was posted in the #announcements channel, which says it's for SRB2 announcements. And yes, I know modding is an integral part of SRB2, but I wish both were at least a bit more separate from each other, for clarity's sake.

Basically, my only choices as of posting are to follow the channel for pings both related and unrelated to SRB2, or none at all and not know when things like when servers will be back up are posted.

Edit: I forgot to mention that you can choose what you want to get pinged on, but your only choices are @prerelease-gang and @oldc-announcements.

Another thing: The only time in the last year the @everyone tag was used was for
-Sonic Frontiers' release and
-New Year's Eve.
There was an incident this year in which people's info was being stolen because of hackers impersonating SRB2 Moderators. That was something I feel that everyone should've been made aware about. But it was treated the same way a joke post was treated.

A lot to unpack here, so I'll go step by step.

Jucei said:

The tag describes the channel as: "Server and SRB2 Announcements". And as I (and probably plenty of other people) follow SRB2 news closely, I like to get pinged for when announcements drop.
But, sometimes, things unrelated to SRB2 itself or the server are posted here.

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1. There is not really an inconvenience here, in my opinion. Even if you have notifications set to "All Messages" for that channel (or if you Follow it in another server), you don't get pings. There's no lingering ping to dismiss. It's just a notification, so it's easy to ignore it, if you're even online when it fires.

Jucei said:

But, sometimes, things unrelated to SRB2 itself or the server are posted here. Sometimes it's holiday and birthday celebrations, which I'm fine with, but other times it's mod releases or random comments made by moderators of the server, which have nothing to do with SRB2 itself.

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2. You have a subjective definition of what qualifies as an "SRB2 announcement." Everything you have described, messages about the website, server, game, and most importantly - the community, all qualify as announcements relevant to SRB2 in some way. You've chosen to define it as solely pertaining to the vanilla game itself. That's fine as your definition, but most of the rest of us disagree.

Jucei said:

Also, #announcements rarely, if at all, ping @everyone. Even when the Master Server needed to be replaced (which took almost a week), @everyone wasn't used, so your only choice was to follow the channel.

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3. The Master Server has been experiencing semi-regular issues for well over a decade. We don't need to be immediately told if it's down, nor was our only option to "follow the channel." You would've known upon being unable to connect in-game, followed by you checking to see if there were any official messages about it. Until it affects you, it's not urgent to know.

It's easy to forget, but the SRB2 official server is pretty big. It has thousands of members, even with regular pruning, so pinging all of them is going to create chaos. It's generally better to only use global pings if absolutely necessary.

Jucei said:

Another problem I have are the videos posted onto the channel. Both with the Chaotix and Dr. Stephen's mod releases, the names for the videos caused confusion. In particular the "SRB2: New Content Approaches!" name is vague enough that you might think it's a content update for SRB2 itself, but it actually being a mod release. You could say that because it wasn't posted by the STjr official channel that we should've known better, but again, it was posted in the #announcements channel, which says it's for SRB2 announcements.

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4. The names of the videos created a minimum amount of confusion. They were uploaded by prominent mod makers, and the latter featured that modder's profile picture in the thumbnail. No patch has ever been announced that way. All updates receive prereleases or pre-release testing. The last time an update received a trailer of any kind was the 2.2.0 release trailer in 2019, and that was after years of announcements. It was very clear to most of us that the trailers would be for mods. If you want to be pinged for content updates, give yourself the Prerelease Testing role. Or, you could check the Git to instantly see everything done for the next update.

Jucei said:

There was an incident this year in which people's info was being stolen because of hackers impersonating SRB2 Moderators. That was something I feel that everyone should've been made aware about. But it was treated the same way a joke post was treated.

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5. Do you mean... the moderator account breach from last year? The one where a single moderator's password was guessed, and some emails were exposed? The one where they DID ping everyone, twice? The one also posted to the website because it was important?
https://discord.com/channels/357945222111428609/357949192876064778/966781225475907604

Did you actually check the incident before making that claim?

DylanDude said:

A lot to unpack here, so I'll go step by step.


1. There is not really an inconvenience here, in my opinion. Even if you have notifications set to "All Messages" for that channel (or if you Follow it in another server), you don't get pings. There's no lingering ping to dismiss. It's just a notification, so it's easy to ignore it, if you're even online when it fires.



2. You have a subjective definition of what qualifies as an "SRB2 announcement." Everything you have described, messages about the website, server, game, and most importantly - the community, all qualify as announcements relevant to SRB2 in some way. You've chosen to define it as solely pertaining to the vanilla game itself. That's fine as your definition, but most of the rest of us disagree.



3. The Master Server has been experiencing semi-regular issues for well over a decade. We don't need to be immediately told if it's down, nor was our only option to "follow the channel." You would've known upon being unable to connect in-game, followed by you checking to see if there were any official messages about it. Until it affects you, it's not urgent to know.

It's easy to forget, but the SRB2 official server is pretty big. It has thousands of members, even with regular pruning, so pinging all of them is going to create chaos. It's generally better to only use global pings if absolutely necessary.



4. The names of the videos created a minimum amount of confusion. They were uploaded by prominent mod makers, and the latter featured that modder's profile picture in the thumbnail. No patch has ever been announced that way. All updates receive prereleases or pre-release testing. The last time an update received a trailer of any kind was the 2.2.0 release trailer in 2019, and that was after years of announcements. It was very clear to most of us that the trailers would be for mods. If you want to be pinged for content updates, give yourself the Prerelease Testing role. Or, you could check the Git to instantly see everything done for the next update.



5. Do you mean... the moderator account breach from last year? The one where a single moderator's password was guessed, and some emails were exposed? The one where they DID ping everyone, twice? The one also posted to the website because it was important?
https://discord.com/channels/357945222111428609/357949192876064778/966781225475907604

Did you actually check the incident before making that claim?

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Cosigning the above as it says pretty much everything I would have said.

The only things I'll add are:
- I'm not sure what justifies the uptightness about such a thing.
- I'm always happy to give a spotlight to anyone's cool work via announcements. People spend years working on some of these things, god knows I'm not going to be stingy about it. Pretty sure all other staff and devs feel the same way.

The #announcements channel is what it says on the tin: things we think are worth announcing to whoever is in the server or follows the channel. This was never restricted to just announcements about the vanilla game, especially because SRB2 is much more than just that: it's also about the developers, the staff, the community and all the content it makes.

Of course, whenever there's an announcement we want to make sure everyone sees, we do so, and with the appropriate clarity: that's what @everyone is for (if you're expecting announcements exclusively about updates to the vanilla game, you should probably restrict pings to that) but separation of announcements through any other criteria seems completely unnecessary at the moment.

2.3 will have menus???!!! POGGERS

DylanDude said:

A lot to unpack here, so I'll go step by step.


1. There is not really an inconvenience here, in my opinion. Even if you have notifications set to "All Messages" for that channel (or if you Follow it in another server), you don't get pings. There's no lingering ping to dismiss. It's just a notification, so it's easy to ignore it, if you're even online when it fires.



2. You have a subjective definition of what qualifies as an "SRB2 announcement." Everything you have described, messages about the website, server, game, and most importantly - the community, all qualify as announcements relevant to SRB2 in some way. You've chosen to define it as solely pertaining to the vanilla game itself. That's fine as your definition, but most of the rest of us disagree.



3. The Master Server has been experiencing semi-regular issues for well over a decade. We don't need to be immediately told if it's down, nor was our only option to "follow the channel." You would've known upon being unable to connect in-game, followed by you checking to see if there were any official messages about it. Until it affects you, it's not urgent to know.

It's easy to forget, but the SRB2 official server is pretty big. It has thousands of members, even with regular pruning, so pinging all of them is going to create chaos. It's generally better to only use global pings if absolutely necessary.



4. The names of the videos created a minimum amount of confusion. They were uploaded by prominent mod makers, and the latter featured that modder's profile picture in the thumbnail. No patch has ever been announced that way. All updates receive prereleases or pre-release testing. The last time an update received a trailer of any kind was the 2.2.0 release trailer in 2019, and that was after years of announcements. It was very clear to most of us that the trailers would be for mods. If you want to be pinged for content updates, give yourself the Prerelease Testing role. Or, you could check the Git to instantly see everything done for the next update.



5. Do you mean... the moderator account breach from last year? The one where a single moderator's password was guessed, and some emails were exposed? The one where they DID ping everyone, twice? The one also posted to the website because it was important?
https://discord.com/channels/357945222111428609/357949192876064778/966781225475907604

Did you actually check the incident before making that claim?

Click to expand...

You (and others who've replied) made a lot of things more clear to me, and I appreciate the response. I did realize that a lot of things I said were more personal nitpicks. And again, I'm aware community produced content is a very large part of SRB2, and most of my time spent with the game is either modding it myself or playing other's mods. But I do have a couple of counter-arguments to bring up:

About your claim on number 5, I'm talking about this post. I had misremembered the incident and confused it with another. While they said there was no direct threat to your personal info being leaked, there were instances where code wrote hundreds of .txt files to bloat your computer, then an audio file directed you to a website to "fix the problem", which obviously downloaded a virus onto your computer.
Nonetheless, it still was something I felt warranted issuing a ping to everyone.
Another point in number 3 was that I wasn't saying we should 'need to be immediately told if it's down', but when we should expect when it'll be back up; I was referring to incidents where the MS was down for days at a time.

Lastly, you say that it is 'very clear' that videos posted onto #announcements are for mods, it isn't stated anywhere that they would be only for modding, so it confuses me that it would be very clear that these were for mods unless you knew after watching a couple of video announcements. I joined the community (under a different account) around mid to late 2018, so the first video I watched in #announcements was the 2.2.0 trailer where they said "coming out when it's done". Maybe it was my misunderstanding but I felt it should've been more clear.

I'm probably going to sound annoying saying this (and this isn't specifically being said to you), but if #announcements was for 'things we think are worth announcing to whoever is in the server or follows the channel' I feel that should be stated instead of the vague 'Server and SRB2 announcements' that is there. It doesn't mention in what regard how the announcements are related to the server and/or SRB2.

And again, I want to repeat that SRB2 (and every other Sonic fan game) is about the community, and it would be a lot less fun if that wasn't the case. I don't want to sound like a butt saying what I did, so I do apologize in advance if anyone got upset with me. My main problem was that it felt to me that the announcements themselves were a bit disorganized, and there aren't many options on what you want to be pinged about (the only options being what I mention in my first post).

I'm double-posting to make it clearer that this last bit is separate from the post before (it probably isn't readable yet), but while I was being subjective on what qualifies as SRB2 announcements, I wasn't saying that those post didn't deserve not being posted in #announcements, nor was I saying that the years of work people in the community wasn't worth my or other's time. I was just suggesting an easier way of getting notified about specific types of posts (like the OLDC and Prerelease roles already instated).
Again, I wasn't trying to sound entitled or a butt about it, and I'm sorry if it came across that way.

The main reason we don't deal with roles for specific announcements is simply they rarely come up in the first place, and are basically never urgent enough to actually require everyone to know immediately compared to just finding out at their own pace. Managing a bunch of roles just to occasionally throw out a message of "the forum is going under maint for the night" or other things is just really a low priority for us, especially since any potential dev teasers is kept in the dev-leaks channel for whenever they want to actually share stuff.

Honestly? I think the moderators and developers have all means to post whatever they like in the channel. And doing a little digging in the channel it looks fine.

I was going to agree with some statements i.e unrelated things to SRB2 but you seem to contradict that statement and say you're ok with holiday related things which is the most recent post "happy boxing day btw" and the 3rd most recent post of "hey, santa". Clearly referring to the current holiday period. I even went to june this year and its mostly the same but the announcements were centred towards OLDC collaborators so i understand that may not be of relation to some, but thats important information for those collaborators.

But i wanted to check announcements myself to understand what you mean, mainly: "random comments made by moderators" - I dont to be short.

Scrolling up just to the next message is enough to give you context of what they said such as the comments updating people of the status of the MB maintenance.

THOUGH on that topic, i do agree with that there wasn't a mention for everyone it was down for maintenance, people were asking alot around that time in the #srb2 channel and the news mostly spread through word.

As someone who doesn't use Discord, I feel like if there's anywhere where information relating to the Vanilla game should be easily accessible, it's here and on the main SRB2 website. The SRB2 website barely gets updates, but as far as I can tell every time something worth announcing in regards to the Vanilla game happens, it does get a thread here via the "News" subforum. IIRC there's also a github page where you can see a bit more in-depth info of what's being worked on at any given time?

It would be a minor convenience to have an easy way to quickly check if the MS is up or not, but honestly it's not really that big of a deal. If I ever made plans to play together with friends, we'd just find something else to do if SRB2 wasn't working for us. We certainly have plenty to do together on Steam if something like that ever happens.

There's ultimately nothing wrong with splitting the announcement channel between mod spotlights, build/game updates, and general community updates if it makes things more readable to the average user. I'd argue splitting the mod spotlight into its own channel in the group would make it easier to pick out any quality mods the staff wanted to prop up.

My message is still awaiting moderator approval, so I might as well post my main points here:

The people who've replied made a lot of things more clear to me, and I appreciate the response. I did realize that a lot of things I said were more personal nitpicks. And again, I'm aware community produced content is a very large part of SRB2, and most of my time spent with the game is either modding it myself or playing other's mods.

For server shutdowns, I wasn't saying we should 'need to be immediately told if it's down', but when we should expect when it'll be back up; I was referring to incidents where the MS was down for days at a time.

Lastly, when DylanDude said that it is 'very clear' that videos posted onto #announcements are for mods, it isn't stated anywhere that they would be only for modding, so it confuses me that it would be very clear that these were for mods unless you knew after watching a couple of video announcements. I joined the community (under a different account) around mid to late 2018, so the first video I watched in #announcements was the 2.2.0 trailer where they said "coming out when it's done". Maybe it was my misunderstanding but I felt it should've been more clear.

If #announcements were for 'things we think are worth announcing to whoever is in the server or follows the channel' I feel that should be stated instead of the vague 'Server and SRB2 announcements' that is there. It doesn't mention in what regard how the announcements are related to the server and/or SRB2.

And again, I want to repeat that SRB2 (and every other Sonic fan game) is about the community, and it would be a lot less fun if that wasn't the case. I don't want to sound like a butt saying what I did, so I do apologize in advance if anyone got upset with me. My main problem was that it felt to me that the announcements themselves were a bit disorganized, and there aren't many options on what you want to be pinged about (the only options being what I mention in my first post).

I know this sounds like I'm trying to avoid moderator approval, but I wanted people to read this so my stance is more clear. Thanks.

time gear said:

It would be a minor convenience to have an easy way to quickly check if the MS is up or not, but honestly it's not really that big of a deal. If I ever made plans to play together with friends, we'd just find something else to do if SRB2 wasn't working for us. We certainly have plenty to do together on Steam if something like that ever happens.

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This may actually help some of my problems, if maybe on srb2.org or the MBs there was a server status you could check somewhere. I also do realize that if I wanted more direct news, I could check SRB2's website or here, but there's less output on the website, and to be honest, checking the Discord server is a lot more convenient.

I don't think you need to be defensive about your statements, the main issue was people believing you were taking umbrage with the contents in particular, rather than mostly being confused about how the channel announcements work and something like achange for the topic for general SRB2 related announcements would be a pretty easy change just to address anyone who might be confused about non-dev/server stuff being posted in there.

Relating to statements on the MB/MS, the main issue is you can't predict when hardware will come in and come up that easily especially when the people working on it are presently out of town and unable to actively work on it.

The organization over the announcements channels trigger me a bit too. It lacking clarity already caused issues.

The announcement channel is a mess that mostly talk about the community or have discussion related to previous posts but there isn't a lot of info about the game itself but it's understandable considering how stuff may change from what would be announced(even if more transparency on the game's future wouldn't hurt).
The development channel don't exists. It's called devtopment and is expected to not be taken seriously because devs post whatever they want and some post are unrelated even if it allow some sneak peek at what could be added. It's purpose isn't clear enough for most people who still think that stuff there are serious.
At least channel following exclude most uninteresting messages from announcement and devtopment but not everyone have a server that follow these channels.

Could be worth having multiple channels for announcement and tell their purpose better than what's currently done.

i would never even notice things like the srb2 direct existing if they weren't posted in the announcements channel

"important" stuff usually ends up on the main website anyways