Honestly, my own packs don't get the attention they deserve despite how long I've been around; most people in the pad-pack community - ITG-wise, anyway - would rather hear about the release of a challenge-only pack that pushes on-foot limits; stuff like the relatively recent release of Tachyon Epsilon, or the upcoming Dragonforce rewrite pack. While packs providing all five difficulty levels are very good for newbies, established players sadly don't care about them whatsoever for the most part.
For news items, if you wish to retain respectability in the pad-based community, I'd recommend sticking mostly with high-profile names; people will want to see news regarding the authors of the above packs (Mad Matt for the Tachyon series, Cosmic Pope for the Dragonforce pack), plus stuff released by stepartists such as Jayce, Mandodo, WinDeu, and Mudkyp; they're all pretty popular in the world of ITG simfiling (and packs are available on DivinElegy).
As for me and my packs - or really, most any pack that has a newbie-oriented aspect - when it comes to catering to the established playerbase, as things presently stand, I and most others like me would honestly be pretty close to the bottom of the list when it comes to hardcore players caring. The way things are now, stepartists such as myself would be best-suited to being thrown in a corner in small-size text, news-wise, until becoming more popular and "deserving" of a more prominent spot in most players' eyes.
Or you can choose to take a page from my book and put such packs on just as prominent a display, sending the message to the challenge-oriented players that new players are just as important as those already established, and helping to raise newbie awareness of stepartists like myself who still care about bringing new players to the scene, letting them know when another newbie-friendly pack has been released that they can use for their early experience-gaining needs.
Regardless, my belief is that staff should definitely continue announcing events and new features - I especially believe you should announce any new room commands that get implemented as well, as those are very important, I'd think. (By the way, if anyone could PM me a full list of all room commands that are currently present on the server, that'd help tremendously, as /help gives me a list so long it doesn't all seem to fit in the chatbox, unless there are exactly as many commands as there is vertical space in the chatbox.
)Pad players, as far as I know, couldn't give less of a crap about FFR (although I'd wager a guess that a lot of SMO players probably value FFR very highly), and except for those who focus on DDR, most pad players don't care about DDR releases, preferring more challenging ITG-style simfile packs and charts - especially given that some like me believe Konami has recently made a lot of bad decisions regarding rating system (the rating system in the DDR X series is horrible, in my and others' opinions, given DDR X seems to think 18 is the new 10) and implementation of elements from ITG since acquiring intellectual property (they still, to my knowledge, don't use single Shock Arrows, preferring to span them across all four receptors every single time they're used, and they have yet to even try to use rolls anywhere that I know of).
Overall I'd say r21Freak and DivinElegy would make good reference points as to what pad players presently care about, and which packs are most popular at the moment.
I stopped playing keyboard-type files years ago, so I couldn't deign to try to say what keyboard players care about - although I'd bet you already have plenty of input on that; I've even dropped out of contention with Otaku's Dream ever since they started focusing on keyboard files; as a result, I no longer play their simfiles, as much as I like them as a community.
That's my two cents.
Cheers
