Announcement improvements

[Colonel_mortis]

The 4.3-style announcements look really nice, and a big improvement over the earlier versions. However, I still have a couple of issues with them that I think would be super easy to solve and would make them much better:

• Allow announcements without a description, or that link somewhere else. Spoiler alert: you want this too - on this site you have a commented out banner which is exactly what I'm asking for:
  
  (but with the option of it just being a link to somewhere else too). This would be used for things that don't need any more content, like "Site maintenance tomorrow", and references to other areas, such as the rules.
• Make the announcement areas more consistent. Currently the top announcement has a "Read more" link, the contentTop announcement is all a link and has a bullhorn at the start, and the sidebar announcement has a bullhorn at the top of the block, each announcement is entirely a link, and has a random (i) icon at the end. This is not great UX.
• The announcement sidebar block doesn't show unless you have another block in the sidebar - there's no way to display just the announcements. While it's useful to be able to not show announcements or the sidebar in general on a page, I could plausibly want to show the announcements and nothing else. It's also pretty poor UX when adding blocks, because the announcements don't show up/disappear until you refresh the page.

Fix these (especially the first - I can tweak the second in themes and the third doesn't actually matter to me personally) and I will be very happy with announcements.

[MMXII]

• Please allow to display the full announcement text (no need to click a link to "open" the announcement)
• Please add an option to make any announcement dismissable/permanent
• Please add an option to schedule announcements
• Please add an option to display announcements on certain pages only (e.g. only sub-forum 1 and sub-forum 2)
• Please add option to display announcements based on conditions (e.g. user is in usergroup X and has made X posts or user has registered X days ago...)
• Please add a custom block that is specifically used to display announcements and allow us to place it anywhere across the Suite
• ...

Announcements have a lot of room for improvements, but I doubt we will see much of this in the current branch. Maybe in IPS 5...

[Meddysong]

And also

• Make announcements translatable, please.

For some of us, forcing English (or another chief language) on users of a second language is highly problematic. There are situations in certain countries where languages must be given equal prominence.

[mz_]

This!  Is there no way just to display what I type in without clicking on a link? IMO, I like that better or should at least be an option! 

• Please allow to display the full announcement text (no need to click a link to "open" the announcement)