Currently our website has a header, controlled by ooo-site/brand.mdtext, that we use to promote special events and announcements. This header shows up on every page on the website, except for wiki and other non-static web pages.
This header is our single most effective way to promote things. It gets 750K+ views per day. This is far more than our blog, Twitter, mailing lists, Facebook, etc., combined. However, this position currently can carry only a single message at a time. So when we have several messages in quick succession, we need to halt the old announcement and replace it with a new one. For example, when I added the marketing volunteers, I had to stop the call for QA volunteers. Juergen has a call for translators coming, and that will likely cause us to halt the marketing call for volunteers. And we want to put up a FOSDEM call for papers soon as well. So the way we're using this it is all or nothing. A message either gets 750K views a day or it gets nothing. I think this is not optimal. It is natural for us to have several ongoing promotions, and it would be sufficient if we could more effectively share that space. One idea might be to not have a static message in brand.mdtext, but encode several messages in a Javascript file, a JSON object that lists all the current messages along with their weighting. Then we could have our website header show a random message, respecting the weights. A high weighted message would get more views than a lower weighted one. But even 10% of 750K is a lot more views that our blog will receive. Does this make sense? Any other ideas? Any ideas on how to implement this? Another idea is to allow graphical as well as the current text-only promotions. A banner graphic can be even more effective. Regards, -Rob
