Announcement feed on homepage

[ToastyKen]

For announcing things like new regional regulations, or even announcing Nats and such.
Status quo is that Facebook is the canonical place we announce things.

TBD exactly how we should implement this. Possible options:

1. Lightweight CMS on website for new articles, and a feed of recent ones on homepage.
2. Keep Facebook canonical, and embed a feed of recent Facebook posts on homepage.
3. Keep Facebook canonical, but also tweet our announcements, and embed a feed of recent Tweets on homepage. (Pretty sure this is possible?)

[timreyn]

I would lean towards either 2 or 3 over 1 based on the amount of work needed. I'm going to defer to the directors about which method you prefer for making announcements, though I'd lean towards 2 because it'd remind people to subscribe on facebook.

[timreyn]

@jpbulman this is the issue I was referring to.

At this point I think a super-lightweight posting system, with one line of text and optionally a link, is the best way to go. I think we use both our twitter and facebook too much for non-announcement things for that to serve the purpose of announcements.

Proposal is:

• A page like https://tim-dot-staging-cubingusa-org.appspot.com/about/documents where admins can make a post that contains text, optionally a link, and an end date (default is now + 3 days)
• When you write a post, an object is written to the datastore (https://github.com/cubingusa/org/blob/master/src/models/document.py as an example)
• On the index page, if the most recent post is still active, add a box like on the top of https://cubingusa.org/nationals/2018 with the announcement
• On the index page, also add a list of the ~4 most recent announcements, similar to the UI of the "more links" box here. We can replace the regional champs box.

[ToastyKen]

I was actually specifically thinking we should have the ability to post more than just a line.

A good example why is this recent post by @cubemasterzach on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/CubingUSA/posts/2294946380516173

It contained many lines of info in advance of the full website being up.

The Instagram post only has a ref to the Facebook post, so the Facebook post became canonical.

I think ideally we would have a non-walled-garden post be the canonical announcement (though mirroring on Facebook would be fine).

[ToastyKen]

(Fwiw I seem able to display that link post in Incognito now, but I think sometimes it gets covered up by a Facebook thing asking you to log in.)

[cubemasterzach]

Hey Kenneth In fear of sounding crass, is there something you’d like me to do different when making posts on Facebook or Instagram?

…

On Jan 29, 2019, at 4:05 AM, ToastyKen ***@***.***> wrote: (Fwiw I seem able to display that link post in Incognito now, but I think sometimes it gets covered up by a Facebook thing asking you to log in.) — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[timreyn]

OK alternate proposal:

-Posts can be >1 line
-If posts are >1 line, on the homepage they only show the first line, along with a "Read more..." link
-The "Read more..." link links to a page that shows the full post.
-The facebook announcement could just say "We announced our qualifying times, click here to see them" and links to the full post

[ToastyKen]

@cubemasterzach I think you're doing a fine job! Sorry, but I didn't mean to complain about anything you were doing.

My only concern is that our de facto place for longer announcements right now is Facebook, and people without Facebook accounts can't always access them. I was just using that post as an example of something that should ideally be accessible without a Facebook account.

Btw, fwiw, I think it's perfectly fine to have the full post and not just a link on Facebook as well. I leave that up to the media team. I just think there should be a way to access them outside of Facebook, too.

[jpbulman]

Sorry about the delay in work on this, I've been doing a little work on a separate branch in my repo, I'll make a PR once more of it comes together. Regarding the date aspect of this, does the admin choose a date for when the post ends, and by default it ends three days from post time?