At some forums, non-replyable news posts have a "discuss here" link and a thread started in the the appropriate area... would that work well here ?

i think we have this where in annoucments it says discuss the new update etc.. in this thread

We tried this once, it didnt really work well sadly... So yea, we dont do that anymore, however after each update our members post posts about it on the general and general p2p boards, you can discuss it there... Normally the users are faster than the admins :P

I can see a staff member editing the news items with links to popular threads (once they are created). Silv tried awhile back to post popular discussion links on the main site in news items and it worked wonderfully. Maybe we can work on doing something similar soon :)