I think this is an area where there is conflict between how the site is designed and how people want to use it -- do people usually want one giant thread for an ongoing thing, vs. specific threads for events?

Under my understanding/intent for how things work on this site, you would use a discussion thread for planning and coordination of a large thing, and then a news thread to announce that it's ready for public consumption/interaction. For example speedmaps are done this way. But there have been cases where people wanted to keep all of the conversation in one long thread where the release/"we're live" announcement is just a post somewhere along the way.

For example, the AD thread is just a giant ongoing thread where important updates are just posts in the thread, rather than a new news thread for each major update. I feel like Quoth patches are announced in a similar way, with new posts inside the existing Quoth thread. And, this Quake Awards thread, under this pattern, would be one thread that lived through the entire sequence of announcement, nominations, winners.

If this is poeple's preferred way to do it, then the "news thread" idea doesn't make sense, the "news" is actually posts within the thread. On the front page of the site, the idea of the news is to make it easy to find important new things, but the AD thread never shows up there because it is an old thread, which happens to still be active. And the Quake Awards winners wouldn't appear on the news page because they would be in a thread that is a month old.

Anyway I'm curious about people's opinions on how things should work here. 

:D 

I don't think anything changed too much in this regard?

Your intent is right in that the preparations of each event/release goes into discussion, and news threads are intended for the final results of each event or release. Map jams continue this pattern - the first one was a case of the "one long thread" you mentioned, but #terrafusion (Scampie in particular) protested about doing it again. By this logic the award thread was correctly moved to discussion - a call to action first and results later.

As for your AD example: There are actually two AD threads, one for the original release and another for 1.5 that contains subsequent patches. (Just as there's a thread for Quoth 1 and another for Quoth 2+.) I would argue that some AD patches, specifically 1.7, warranted their own news threads, since they included new maps and also multiple updates to the existing maps. So again it's a matter of one person's preference over how things have historically worked on the board.

I think the actual question here is how many people actually use the func frontpage for news? I've had the forum page set to display as my homepage ever since I registered (so almost 10 years). 

The one long thread only works if you have moderator powers to edit and add links to the top sticky post.

For all the rest of us plebs, we habe to resort to making a new thread if we want easily findable download links. 

Discussion for planning, answering questions, announcing nominees in this case.

News when the event is completed (announcing winner, congrats etc.) 

well the organising is being done elsewhere, so I thought I would use the news thread to help get the word out...

It's all good, word spread around via twitter, etc.

I'll resubmit a news article once maps are shortlisted, and maybe again once the judging has been done and the results have been published ;) 

Quoth 2.2 got its own news thread. It was quite a while after the original thread, and the fact that a new thread would appear on the front page was another reason to do so. The fact that the original post in a thread can't be edited also encourages users to create a new post when there are new files to link to. 

There are some grey areas but generally it works fine. Some people are only interested in the final results of an event, not the planning and discussion, for them the later news thread is most useful. For people who are more actively involved, the discussion threads are more useful.

I think with things like AD and Quoth, it would be useful in there was an option for a moderator to flag a news thread as "Major update" so it would get bumped onto the main page. Although like OTP I only ever use the forum page... 

I think this is an area where there is conflict between how the site is designed and how people want to use it -- do people usually want one giant thread for an ongoing thing, vs. specific threads for events?

I don't like the split of news and forum posts. I have always wanted one thread to search, update and keep everything together. I don't see how news pages are relevant anymore because google data mines/indexes all these pages. I can often find keyword searches on googles pointing directly to the right pages. I think its more confusing (for new people) when there is multiple pages. 

Is that we can't update the sticky at the top. If the thread creator at least had that privilege, it would make the one thread more workable and save time from having to hassle moderators.

One other thing that would help, if news were eliminated, would be to expand the list of recent threads posted-in on the main forum page. Adding a filter for this within the all threads page would be nice too to sort by most recently posted in. 

I really dislike how at Doomworld I have to dig through X pages of a thread originally posted in 2015 to get where the discussion of the current release starts in the one-and-only thread. 

You can just go to the last page, that's probably where the discussion about the latest release is, or the next to last one