Playing around with ideas and this is something we could Showcase here on the homepage.
It would help our Sponsors and they could post information about events and sales or anything going on at their store?
Does this sound like a good idea?
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I think it is a good idea. Might encourage the sponsors to also interact with the forum more. Are you intending on getting them to have their own accounts or post for them?
The thought is for them to have their own accounts. Less work for the people managing the forum that way.
We may have to talk to them about some guidelines – we don’t want to see posts everyday from a sponsor, but we would be pretty open about it.
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I think this is a great idea. The way things are right now it would be really nice to have updates on who is open for sales or service and even when they get in shipments of high demand items like…umm…bikes.
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How does this work if more than 2 have an announcement?
Or will this be something we discuss with sponsors - saying first in gets a spot?
Last question - we talked about this being time-boxed, is that still the plan - a sponsor can put up an announcement but it only lives there for a week (length of time tbd)?
I think it looks ok, I am interested to hear what more members think as the forum is for members primarily
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So, right now it is set at 2 announcements. This can be changed if required. Keeping it small so it takes up less space is good for the look of the forum. I tried it with 3 and that is OK too, I would not want to go more. If we got a lot of uptake from sponsors we might need to look at this. We can prioritize an announcement to stay at the top for a certain length of time though, but normally it would just queue out when new announcements come in.
We can make them only last a certain length of time then disappear, but that is an admin setting. Not going to give sponsors the ability to set that. So we would have to login and put the time limit on manually. There might be some optional plugin to do this automatically for certain categories – I will look into that.
So … the answer to your question is there are options that need to be discussed 
I agree we don’t want a lot at the top, 2 items looks good.
Interesting that announcements get queued out…maybe this is something we deal with if the situation comes up…probably not a big concern right now.
Also agree we don’t want to give the length of time to sponsors to control. Sounds like there is a bit of admin required to keep this clean (unless you find a plug-in). I think this comes down to how much forum admin support we have - many hands light work
To Clarify a bit. Things will queue out of the Showcase at the top as new topics come in, but they will live forever in the Announcement or Sponsor section down at the bottom ( unless we remove them)
I see @tcauduro is playing with timeout options. I am sure there are things we can do.
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Sponsor News category – great!
Categories at the top of the page – please no
Yes, totally. Especially if there’s a separate forum heading (not sure of the lingo…‘thread’, ‘sub-category’, etc?). Basically, we want to encourage all of the WCC sponsors to promote their products and services, so if we have a dedicated space for this it seems like a win-win for all.
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Based on other forums I am part of (I have too many hobbies), a sponsor forum is a must. It provides two benefits, good deals for members and great support for our LBS’s. Lots of us order things online from other shops globally. This would provide a place for sponsors to hit a dedicated audience…
Besides, I love a good deal…
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We have a sponsor forum (Category) as well for exactly the reasons you mention. This would be in addition to that.
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