Recently, I am beginning to see announcements where the poster is taking a hiatus for short tasks that do not need a lot of time to be done, mostly as a reaction to this particular post about various issues with forum posts. Unfortunately, it is starting to get annoying as it begins to clog up the forums with unneeded hiatus announcements. Therefore, I am going to create a tutorial on how to make a good hiatus announcement that is not annoying and could help you become a better person. Let me explain...

Update: thankfully, the moderators have begun removing joke hiatus announcments; in their messages, they usually refer to the honorable mention.

If you are going to make announce your hiatus on the forums as a forum post, make sure you are not taking a really short one (e.g. doing short tasks that can be done in an hour or so on)!

Only do so when you need to take a significantly long leave, due to various life issues (e.g. you going on an examination and you need to do a lot of studying (and/or homework) to pass said examination), and that you can not interact with the forums. A short task, especially an everyday one, that can be done easily and in a short amount of time cannot justify a forum post announcement, as it is an insignificant aspect of life. Sure, you can announce to users take a break to do short tasks when chatting in real-time (and in some cases, chatting in the forums that isn’t a forum post), but announcing such in forum posts is quite wasteful (imagine making forum posts announcing that you are taking a break because you are going to sleep and will return shortly after your slumber every day on the forums, would that clog up the forums?).

• that also applies to announcement posts in spaces like Discord or Twitter, as these are not comments but public-wide posts.

Make sure your reason for taking a hiatus is clear enough to a layperson, clarify if needed.

When you make an announcement post that is vague and confusing to a layperson, people are going to speculate and ask a lot (“personal life issues” does not count as vague and confusing). If they need clarification, then clarify. It saves a lot of time if you make your post clear enough, so you don’t have to have people ask a lot.

• On the other hand, no need to make your forum post so emotional and dramatic (I.e. “edgy”). Please do not make it as if you are attempting to grab as much attention as possible.

You can make a forum post detailing why you have not interacted with simpleplanes.com for so long (like years).

You can make a forum post detailing your inactivity if the SimplePlanes community is asking why are you so inactive for such a long amount of time, but same thing with hiatus announcements, it must not come because of a short task that is easy to accomplish and in a short amount of time.

Conclusion

With this tutorial about how to make good hiatus announcements, I hope you are going to stop making unnecessary hiatus announcements. I know you probably have fans and you need to take a break, but please make it reasonable. Eventually, I hope this trend would eventually die down as with other fads. I hope that helps. Good luck.

Signed.

Bellkitsu/Bellcat

P.S. I have a honorable mention that you should read.