Still Need GameInfoHub Notifications
I have discussed this before, but I just now noted the great post by CG_Meathead over on the GameInfoHub.
The GIH does not update often. It's not at all uncommon for a week to go by without any new OPs from the CG team. Now, this is absolutely fine. I don't want Meathead's schedule to be cluttered with writing useless things like, "Great Post, Seedy!" just to show that they haven't forgotten the Forums exist.
That said, the "recent/active posts" feature only shows you the recent ones within a subforum. Thus for people who spend most of their time in general discussion, there's no way to know that an important new post has dropped. The Community Highlights feature was, I thought, an attempt to fix this, but it's reporting old pinned posts instead of the most recent Game Info Hub post, which is what it really should show.
I had suggested other ways of handling this, such as putting the CG posts to GIH on the recent/active post tracker for ALL subforums. This, however, would require a certain amount of recoding. While at the time I thought it likely to be trivial, the fact that it hasn't yet been done suggests I may have underestimated the difficulty -- particularly if "Community Highlights" was supposed to be the fix for that, but is now being frustrated by how pins work.
Still -- CG should want Forum users to see CG posts. And indeed I want to see them! I'm not entirely sure that my recent post asking for an update on when UltJourney events will be simmable came before or after Meathead's post. (I think I posted on Monday, but it could have been early Tuesday, and if so it was on the same day as Meathead's post in which case SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, MEATHEAD!) So there's at least a chance I would bother the good folks at CG less if I knew that a new road ahead (or similar) had dropped. Someone else asked for sims late enough that I'm sure it was after Meathead's post, so... yeah. There's redundancy here from folks who just aren't aware of your messaging.
Folks at CG have been bothered by my requests for better communication before, but this latest post on the upcoming title update is fantastic -- it's clear and addresses many popular topics of critique. So my modest proposal is that either our notification bells -- for all folks on the SW forums -- get a ring OR when a major post drops, that CG also drops a post in general discussion just pointing to their new post in the GameInfoHub.
The new post was great, and on the old forums it would be visible on the home page. The new forums don't provide that visibility so please, please update the forums just a smidge so that the posts Meathead spends so much time spellchecking actually get out to all the interested eyeballs.
Thanks again from your annoyingly critical friend,
Seedy.
