On numerous occasions I’ve needed to notify users of updates, server downtime, or plans and there is no easy way to notify the users. It would be nice if there was an implemented way of communicating to the users through the Plex dashboard.
A few potential ways of approaching this:
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On the Plex Home page, a new title card (similar to Continue Watching, Recently Added, Recommended, ETC.) could be created titled Announcements. It would sort dates/times of the server owner’s posting them, so newer announcements are always visible. Once the announcement is read or functionally ‘watched’ the Announcements Home page title card could be hidden until new a post is made.
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Pin a single ‘Movie’ or ‘TV show’ titled ‘Announcements’ to the top of user’s queue and the server owner can edit the text that appears in the ‘poster’ so users can read these.
The first option requires a bit more work to implement but is quite a bit cleaner.
I’ve been implementing the second option on my own, and had worked nicely - though it is a bit annoying to manually do this without official support. A sample of how I’ve been doing this is attached: This ‘manual’ way of doing it is annoying because anytime something new is added, the ‘announcement’ needs to be re-upped to the top of the recently added section. To do this I need to delete the blank media, library scanned, re-add the blank media, then tie the Paint.exe poster to the media.
Since implementing this i have notice users are SIGNIFICANTLY more responsive and engaged with the platform than they were before I started doing this. The engagement from and to users makes them feel more heard and incentivizes them to stay on platform.
