For some reason it's always been a huge struggle to get users to read announcements, especially new users (and I know this because I can track this). Even though I have plans to eventually do video announcements (which will encourage users to get full details of each announcement), I still need to find a way to get them to go to the actual page and read through them. I tried making the Announcements link bigger and also placed a blinking 'NEW' icon next to it for newbie users but that still doesn't help so I've decided to take things even further: Full Page Notification Overlay.

If you go too long without reading an announcement (or a PM), you'll get a full page notification that reminds you to read it. It's random and the randomness increases based on how many unread Announcements and Private Messages you have.

Here are the odds for Announcements:
10+ Unread Announcements = 1 out of 25 *
3+ Unread Announcements = 1 out of 100
1+ Unread Announcement = 1 out of 250

Here are the odds for Private Messages:
25+ Unread Private Messages = 1 out of 250
10+ Unread Private Messages = 1 out of 1000
1+ Unread Private Messages = 1 out of 2500

*NOTE: All new users have all announcements ever posted as unread until they read their first announcement.

These will not appear once you've read all of your unread stuff. It'll also not appear on certain pages. I'm really hoping this gets more users to see what's going on in the world of Vizzed and hopefully we have less users bugging us with questions that have answers in the latest announcements. This should definitely help out the site a lot with getting users more involved in stuff and to help get new features used more as well.

Here's what it looks like (clicking the X or the link closes it).


EDIT: I realize the typo and it has been fixed in my code.

LOL

David, you're going to be getting these a lot lol. 

I'm sure you'll just turn it off for yourself lol

I like the feature, and hopefully more users will join netplay and stuff. 

Barathemos : I'll leave it on since I plan to tackle my PMs once I get caught up with all of the stuff taking place lately. Yeah I'll get it 1 out of 250 times but that's not so bad and wont be too annoying.

I was having that same thought . At least it's not too frequent. Still, that would take more than a few visits to the time to have a good chance of popping up.

I like it mostly because it will never affect me. I read announcements and PM's almost immediately.

Add another user who will never be affected by this to the list.

This will surely help new users read the announcements. Of course, we're not forcing them to read the +30 pages of announcements we have, but at least the most recent ones.

The odds for PMs are a bit low. Could you maybe make a script that increases the chance to see this for PMs sent by system users? After all, those PMs are either to be helpful or an alert of a bad attitude, so they are always important, and even then newbies tend to ignore them.

Davideo7 : jesus, man! check your damn notifications already!

I'm honestly fairly against this. I mean, I take care of my inbox but. . . goodness! It's not that hard to miss and let users read stuff when they WANT to read it!

Learning how to use a new website takes time. Forcing people to learn how to use it can become annoying and they won't like it.

Sword legion : They're not really being forced to do anything. They can simply click the X and not have to worry about it again for a while. And if it really pisses them off, all they simply have to do is click the Announcement link and exit out of it really fast before they learn something about the site and they wont get the overlay again until quite a while after the next Announcement.

I know this site better than you do and I know that a lot of users don't read the Announcements, even users who have been using the site for months and years. The Announcements are sometimes important and they can help avoid the site from losing lots of traffic.


Rasenganfan2 : Every time I plan to set aside a week or 2 to go through them, something comes up. Between my Notifications and Private Messages, it'd probably take 2-3 weeks to get through them all and that's if I don't do anything else and also if I get lucky and nothing urgent comes up.


EX Palen : I could definitely look into something like that in the future.

Davideo7 : I was just messing with you, man. I'm sure a lot of newbs are tagging you and messaging you 24/7

This is great.
I wouldn't mind if this popped up every time I got a message.

Would you be able to add an option for how frequent it comes up in the user settings?

this is a great idea, but I can see why it can become a hassle for some.

Davideo7 : This is really an AMAZING plan. I know that we've talked about it a million times were it really just baffles me that people don't read the site announcements. Hopefully after this, people will have NO CHOICE but to keep themselves informed about site news, and hopefully cut down on PM's to the staff inboxes for needless questions regarding answers they could get by READING THE DANG ANNOUNCEMENTS!!!!!!!! LOL

People can live with the two second "hassle" to make sure they are seeing what they need to see. I know I wont mind it.

Great work David!

This is kinda aggravating for me because I'm seeing on a regular basis for every 3 pages a notification.

Vanelan : I could eventually make it so the settings are adjustable.

Jordanv78 : I completely agree.

tRIUNE : I don't know how that's even possible unless there's a glitch in my code. I've honestly only seen the notification twice since I've implemented it and I've got 564 New Private Messages.

That definitely woulda helped yesterday for my netplay match. ^^;

As of now, I don't have the problem I mentioned. However, I'll elaborate that the notification was occurring for (almost) every 3 pages of vizzed that I viewed.

tRIUNE : Which one? For Private Messages or Announcements?

It was for Announcements. I had about 4 unread announcements. It all seems random, so don't worry about it. Thanks for all the work you do for Vizzed.

I've only received the PM notification around 6 times since I implemented this which is a lot less than I expected so I'm going to increase the rate for PM notifications. I'm actually going to increase the rate for Announcements as well.

Here are the new values for Announcements
10+ Unread Announcements = 1 out of 25 *
3+ Unread Announcements = 1 out of 100 50
1+ Unread Announcement = 1 out of 250 100

Here are the new values for Private Messages:
25+ Unread Private Messages = 1 out of 250 100
10+ Unread Private Messages = 1 out of 1000 250
1+ Unread Private Messages = 1 out of 2500 500

I've also decided to do this with Notifications but these values will be much higher:
25+ Unread Notifications = 1 out of 250
10+ Unread Notifications = 1 out of 1000
1+ Unread Notifications = 1 out of 2500