Suggestions

[quote name="Jemadar" date=2017-07-17 13:16:38] The thing is, why would people go to the first page? It is only another stepping stone, especially with the time between updates, to get to where they truly want to know. Many people don't care about another welcome week since they happen regularly now, the festival announcements are nice, but again, they are a regular occurrence and not something most people need to be reminded of. [/quote] Why go to the main page? To discover if there is anything new to the site. It is as simple as that. If people don't want to do an extra click to read the main page then so be it. They don't need to be hand held in order to get new information by way of "news alerts".

[quote name="Cadash" date=2017-07-17 11:26:31] Maybe just like, click the homepage once a week to see what's up? It's literally right there. [/quote] THIS.

[quote name="SoulOfChaos" date=2017-11-25 06:21:19] Bringing this back may be a bad idea but...there are a bunch of people that have missed the site status update about food energy not going down sooooo....I think its a good optional alert thing, maybe something you can subscribe to like a thread. Though then it would need to be put somewhere you could subscribe to news. Maybe in the welcome week post? Though I certainly didn't read that when I joined. Like yea its easy to say "why wouldn't you check the main page every once in a while" but there are clearly people that don't check it that often, or at least don't look at the site status box. [/quote] The whole thing is, to me at least, if this were a site that had daily news updates etc... most people would check daily, but it isn't. Updates are few and far between, and even if you set your homepage to the news, you could still easily miss the news. As I said earlier in the thread, I often will leave the forums open with baldwin open if I am doing that. I don't often go back to the news page because there is usually no need for it. However, there have been times I have noticed threads popping up and realized something had happened and went and checked, and there was a news post. However, without those threads, I often would miss updates, especially if I am doing the coliseum or Baldwin. To me, it isn't even a matter or not checking, it is of checking and 5 minutes later a news update happens. I don't think having to run back to the main page every 5 minutes to make sure you don't miss an update is optimal. Also, this is one instance of 'nearly every other site': Nearly every other site I know of that has sporadic news updates has a notification system that usually displays a banner across the page. Neopets is the only site I play that doesn't have it, and they have regular updates every day at (nearly) a certain time. So you KNOW when to start checking for news. I don't know how hard it would be, but perhaps users could subscribe to certain forums... so that players who wanted could subscribe to the news and announcements forums, though that would still miss the status box updates.

support! it would be nice to be able to subscribe to the 'Latest News' and the 'Site Status' updates rather than having it be a catch-22 of 'if you want to know when to check the main page, check the main page.' [quote name="Cadash" date=2017-07-17 11:26:31] Maybe just like, click the homepage once a week to see what's up? It's literally right there. [/quote] this is coming from a place of wanting to know things happen When they happen, or the suggestion wouldn't have been made in the first place. the current system already caters to anyone who doesn't need/want that; this is just a suggestion for there to be an option that caters to those that do. [s]most of the criticisms to this seem to be 'i personally wouldn't use it so it shouldn't exist' tbh; but then again this is the suggestion forums so what else should i expect...[/s] [quote name="Jemadar" date=2017-07-16 07:36:46] One simple way of doing it would be to do like they do for welcome week. Change the Flight rising logo. IE for new genes it could simply have 'New Genes!' under it and link to the announcement post. [/quote] i really like this idea as well!