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I've made a proposal for a new site recently and 19 people have decided to follow it. Most of these users appear to be just casual followers, but I'd like to make an announcement, requesting that followers get a little more involved and ask questions and vote on existing ones.

Is this an appropriate use of the Announcement section of my proposal or are there more stringent guidelines that would consider this inappropriate?

Also, I found this question on the discussion board, but it doesn't appear to answer my question. Could someone please clarify the specific guideline regarding announcements, especially in regards to messages such as mine being posted in the annoucement section?

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Update: This is now a moderator-only feature.

I'd like to make an announcement, requesting that followers get a little more involved …

No, I'm sorry, but prompting users to utilize the Area 51 process is not an 'announcement.' Announcement are (or at least should be) very rarely used … most often to clarify a proposal in a way that does not quite fit the description.

You should pretty much ignore the feature altogether:

Announcements should be used very, very little and the Discussion Zone should be used for almost everything. I tried to get the "Comments" section limited to moderators (and possibly the original author). But as a first step to curbing the inappropriate use of comments, the feature was renamed to "Announcements" and the help text made more prominent:

Use announcements for short notifications or clarifications. For questions, ideas, or suggestions, please use a discussion.

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  • Ok, great. That's what I had assumed which is why I wanted to clarify.
    – RLH
    Jun 25, 2012 at 18:14
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    Whilst I understand this policy, I feel it is rather harsh. In particular I think that reminding people that they need to vote and use their questions is a reasonable use of a notification, especially when a proposal has many followers who are new to the stack exchange network, let alone Area 51.
    – Mark Booth
    Aug 8, 2012 at 11:04
  • I agree. This guideline took me totally unawares.
    – DBUK
    Oct 23, 2012 at 7:30

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