Forum Policy for "Notice" use

[Julian]

The forum software we use has a feature that allows us to publish "Notices" at the top of the forum to annouce things to our members. This feature has proven itself very powerful when it comes to getting the membership's notice for certain events. These notices appear as a banner at the top of the forum, and can be dismissed by each member at any time (an "X" in the upper right of the notice dismisses it). So although it is easy to dismiss, we don't want to overuse it, and want to publish our policy regards its use.

Thus far we've used it for 4 things:

1. New members (those with 5 or less posts) get a notice about the FAQ, Rules etc.
2. We published JetBoatpilot's group buy on Seadek
3. We published a notice about the pending order of Jetboaters.net flags
4. We published an April 1st shut down notice as a joke

From this point forward, we will use the notice capability for:

1. Forum Promotion - Publishing Forum SWAG opportunities like the flags, stickers etc
2. Publishing Vendor offers for Jetboaters.net members only - where the vendor offers a discount or valuable incentive to the OUR members (we reserve the right to limit the duration and frequency of use - in general, the larger the discount, the longer/more often we will publish the offer). Vendors should contact forum administration to request a "notice". Vendors must be "Active", contributing (Active is a member title level) of the forum. 2 types of Vendor notices will be published:
   1. A time based group buy/or significant time based discount
   2. A quarterly announcement for standing discounts (this will announce, in one notice per quarter, all the vendors offering fixed discounts to our members)
3. Other board administration needs

We will adjust this policy as needed so we don't over use the notice feature.

Below is an example of a notice (This is notice #1 above that new members see):

 

[Tranio]

Great feature and good use of it.