TeX & Friends announcements in chat?

Question

I understand that TeX.SE is not the right medium for news, announcements, conference calls, etc., but in the recent days there have been some interesting bits of information that popped up in the chat that might be of interest to the general public of TeX.SE.

This post is to draw somewhat wider attention to this topic, as the chat is definitely not the most used feature on the site.

• There is the QuickLaTeX WordPress plugin with some interesting functionality, by Pavel Holoborodko: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-quicklatex/

• Detexify seems to be in need of additional support: http://detexify.posterous.com/detexify-needs-help

• Martin Scharrer announced a handy reference sheet of LaTeX macros intended for package authors: http://www.scharrer-online.de/raw-attachment/wiki/LaTeX/files/macros2e.pdf

I think this is a very good use of chat, which has been basically deserted since its introduction here, and those kinds of information does not fit even on meta, but could be of interest to the general public of TeX.SE.

Perhaps we could use the chat primarily as message board, with discussions in-place related to the announcements? The announcements themselves could be starred for visually distinguishing them from the surrounding discussions.

Other opinions?

Answer 1

Perhaps we could use the chat primarily as message board, with discussions in-place related to the announcements? The announcements themselves could be starred for visually distinguishing them from the surrounding discussions.

I think that can be OK as long as the titles are useful. This post's title is not useful.. should it be "Monthly Tex Announcements - Feb 2011"? "Quarterly Tex Announcements - Q1 2011"?

Remember that chat is stateful, so the chat archives exist forever, and they are searchable. That said, in a busy chat room it is often hard to find things between all the conversations.

So it can be OK to do it in both places, but I think you need to structure the meta posts so they are infrequent enough that they don't come to dominate meta, as it was not intended primarily for announcements.