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The Announcements forum has been separated from the main support forum to make it more prominent.
We want people to see it and subscribe to it.
We want to grow the Announcements forum mailing list.
The Announcements forum has been locked-down so registered users can only
read the forum and posts.
Registered users can no longer create new threads or respond to existing announcement posts.
Only forum Administrators or Moderators can start new threads.
This prevents spammers from sending emails to all subscribers of the forum (as we have seen).
And it now will only send the main announcement as an email, not for every reply.
Users will un-subscribe from the Announcements forum if they keep getting a bunch of emails which are not the important FLEXIcontent announcements or news they were expecting.
An
Announcements Discussions forum has been created.
Again only forum Administrators or Moderators can start new threads.
But registered users can reply.
So when an announcement post is created in the Announcements forum,
a corresponding thread should be created in the Announcements Discussion forum.
This way . . .
Subscribers get only the email of the original announcement,
those who want to reply can do so in the discussion thread,
no spamming is possible,
everyone is happy.
Take a look at the Joomla forum and the Kunena forum for examples of how this works.
Other forums do it this way too.
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