Topic: "Important announcements" section doesn't contain important announcements (Read 855 times)

You will also notice that I didn't copy in that announcement about Rebate, Zip.A, Alberto & BDT from JRO. That's because I really didn't see how that would be a large enough impact to the community, despite the fact that the thread was specifically reported to the moderation team. As you can see, we have pretty high standards about what should go there.

I'm with Maged, it's not like noone gives a fuck. Stuff like that is concerning lots of people in the Bitcoin community, both directly and indirectly because of how large it is.

I disagree that they aren't important, and a 50% drop in the value of Bitcoin confirms that thought. When I decide what to post there, I go by two main metrics: impact to the community and impact to the press. In general, I'd say that anything that effects over 30% of the community should be posted there. As for press impact, if anything is likely to get major press attention, and it's not speculation about something that isn't yet released, it should also be posted there. I agree with many of Meni's points.

My goal is for there to be, on average, about 1 thread per week in that forum. As someone who has been around for more than a year, I feel qualified to determine that. The other mods seem to be able to figure that out as well and I trust their judgement on these matters.

Absolutely. There's no point to copy in the old posts, but it makes sense to do this going forward. New versions of Bitcoin, of course, effect a majority of the users here.

Again, I agree. The Important Announcements board is not just for emergencies, but should only be facts about the present reality. No speculation. As another example, the September announcement might be worth putting in there (if it lives up to its hype and is not just another pre-announcement itself, but a release), but the announcement about it coming up shouldn't.

Not all users use the standard client or any local client, or would care much about anything but critical security fixes.

"Important" announcement should be measured by how much impact it has on Bitcoin, where "Bitcoin" is the Bitcoin economy, the software is just a means to an end. Things like the Bitcoinica or Pirate stories have as much impact as new client versions.

A new glorified way to sell bitcoins conveniently, on the other hand, should be last on the list of candidates for a mention.

Hopefully sometime in the future, the Bitcoin economy will be "the economy", the Bitcoin scams will be "scams", and development on the Bitcoin software will be "developing financial software". But right now these are all encompassed by the "Bitcoin" umbrella, and this is a forum dedicated to Bitcoin.

Maged,

I was happy to see this section because we really need somewhere more visible and separated to do things like announce new versions of the core software, and other things of interest to the entire community.

Instead this section appears to only contain information about various scams and schemes that by no means all Bitcoin users are involved in or care about.

For instance, I really don't care at all about pirateat40 and what he's doing so quite why giant running commentaries should end up in a section called "important announcements" is beyond me. It's not important at all. For people who care about the BS&T scheme they can read about it in the threads devoted to that topic.

Could those threads please be moved out of the important announcements section and threads related to test/full software releases on various platforms be moved in? Services like the BitInstant card (when actually launched) might also qualify as it'd be something of general interest to any Bitcoin user.