With the service growing exponentially, I felt like we needed a way of announcing notable events without relying on Discord or restricting our target to the Discord server's members. This was the primary reason for creating the blogging system you are viewing this on right now.

Why don't you just write a message on the announcement channel?

Speaking from experience, announcements usually get disregarded by members!

Because of their informal nature - as they are messages on a read-only channel - announcements are - most of the time - ignored, especially if they are long and comprehensive. If you ping people, they will just get agitated resulting in mad users or people even leaving the community entirely... Trust me, I've seen that as well.

How will blogs solve this problem?

Blogs will not solve the problem entirely. However, they will provide me and the rest of the staff team with a way to inform members who care enough with up-to-date information organized in an understandable way. Another issue is that announcement messages get lost after a while as they get pushed upwards by newer messages. This will not be a problem anymore since the new blogging system helps users quickly browse through posts without much effort from the blog page.

What will blogs include? Who will be posting?

Most of the time I will be analyzing aesthetic features, security/attack mitigations or infostructure-related topics in detail but that won't be it! Staff members who organize events will be posting about them here and possibly promoting the winners as well! I'm extremely hopeful about the fact that it will be a nice addition to the service in general.

Will the announcement channel die?

Obviously not! The announcement channel will be reserved for quick and small notes about the service and might mirror some blog URLs every now and then. One thing's for certain though: if you want to keep yourself updated about everything signed.host has to offer, you should be checking this blog every now and then.

Summing what was said up, was it a bit overkill to create a blogging system from complete scratch just to solve a couple of small issues? We will let you be the judge...