I don't have much of a problem with that. What is an annoyance is that that message has been there for around 6 month and it was updated once or twice.
On the other hand, I hardly see it because I concentrate on the main content of the page. And because of that, I might not even notice an update of that banner due to that.
Hi @timespansoul. Thanks for your feedback. I added this message, and a pinned topic, in response to concerns expressed by some community members that Arduino was not making a strong enough effort to communicate to the forum users about this serious situation.
There are some forum users who use the forum only sporadically, but do come back to participate every few years. The concern was that some of these users might have missed the email that was sent to all accounts with an "inactive" status, and thus would not be aware that their account was about to be deleted.
At the time the message was added, the deletion was to occur in four days. And of course it will be removed after the initial round of inactive account deletions had been done. So it was never expected to be present for months as it has. However, the Arduino company took seriously the concerns expressed by the community about the loss of content attribution that would be caused by the anonymization of the inactive accounts, and so the inactive account deletion was put on hold while the company worked to try to find some way to preserve the attribution while complying with the various data protection regulations that have been enacted recently in jurisdictions across the globe. Since it involved complex legal issues, this endeavor ended up taking a long time, without any clear idea of exactly when it would be resolved. So we have remained in this state where the account deletion was at least theoretically imminent for months instead of the expected days, and that is still the case (though now it is more imminent than it was a month ago since the investigation has been concluded and the policy finalized, with adjustments to mitigate the problem of loss of attribution).
Even though the message is annoying, I think it is important that I do everything in my power to try to make sure that all potentially affected users are aware of the situation. I would rather be subjected to complaints about the annoying banner than feel that I didn't do enough to prevent valued forum members from losing their account because they didn't realize they had to log in to preserve the account's active status.
Something to note is that the Arduino company traditionally uses this banner to advertise the Arduino Cloud service, and it will return to that usage after the inactive account deletion warning is removed. So this is not a case of the warning taking up precious screen space that would otherwise be freed.
However, I do understand that the current message is jarring compared to the more subtle Arduino Cloud advertisement. The colors and exclamation marks are very intentionally added to make it jarring, since forum users have expressed concerns that the banner is too easily ignored to effectively communicate important matters to the user base. I am not someone who uses emoji casually. In fact, it was more subtle until just recently when I received feedback that the previous message was not noticeable enough.
Are you telling me that people were complaining that inactive accounts weren't being deleted? Interesting, lol.
I see. I imagine that this wasn't too effective given that the users of these inactive accounts aren't logging in anyway. A private message would've been more obvious to the users in question if they were to indeed log in.
Pert, aren't you the moderator who suspended me for complaining to you personally about being gaslighted by your AI software? I came here to learn about this Arduino product, not to receive disparaging remarks from an AI bot.
You then proceeded to suspend my account for, and I quote " wasting moderator's precious time." You suspended me for two weeks. I must've hurt your feelings or something, because I definitely didn't stray outside the community guidelines. You sir, should not be a moderator.
Maybe people simply don't care about their Arduino accounts because Arduino, or at the very least the "people" representing Arduino are giving them VERY good reasons to leave.
