I know that by time stamps, the announcements are often times made well in advance of when it first becomes public knowledge (i.e. when it becomes visible to us)

And as nick makes 99.9% of all announcement posts, as well as posts on the discussion forum sometimes, It would seem like he could have two windows up, one on the announcement forums and one on general (with info cut and pasted). He could then make the announcement visible to the community, switch screens and click make new topic. --or if nick creates the original thread and someone else is responsible for "taking it live," that person could do the same.

Both posts would be created within less than 5 seconds of each other. And if standard practice was "OOO creates announcement-OOO creates General Discussion Topic" then player knights would not be rushing to try and be the first to let everyone know. We'd all accept, for the most part, that that particularly job is one that takes care of itself :)

p.s. @ paweu

I thot that at first too. But everything considered, its a rather handy tool to have an announcements thread that is clean, concise, and clutter free.