> FR threads will be streamlined into one big Chat forum. Who needs Bleaking News?
We really need to be able to post a topic by entering the URL, with the excerpting limit clearly shown, but manual editing available (to avoid auto-excerpting silliness like “RELATED: a story that isn’t actually related” and the like). The FR software would be able to screen out A) topic duplicates and B) impermissible sources.
Generally there are META tags that have keywords that could be read in, and the TOPICS and KEYWORDS here could be replaced with a single “TAGS”. Still have the option for additional TAGS later for the pingmeisters around here (hi all!).
The existing subforum structure is goofy — TOPICS are from a limited list and never the twain shall meet (Astronomy for example exists in Chat and Bloggers, but separately); merging the legacy TOPICS and KEYWORDS into the TAGS systems would make things a breeze.
IOW, I agree, get rid of the public subforum divisions (there’s at least one subforum for the mods only, I’m guessing).
Currently the addition of a TOPIC or a KEYWORD saves the topics by number, but chronologically to the time it was added to the list, not chronologically to the time the topic was posted. That actually works out just fine IMHO.
Forum ideas — I’d wish for a single, National News forum. Threads in News could be keyworded for each state. Most everything would go here but could be filtered out with keywords, much like a Gmail inbox that receives everything but has different views/tabs/filters. Using multiple filters, Humor + Maine keywords would find all the funny stuff in Maine, for example. All states would post to the same global forum but be filtered by state in searches.
World News would be all non-USA news and could have filters available.
Activism, Chapters and AAR might be combined and flagged within a forum unto itself.
Keywords - some awesome keywords/phrases are a little longer than 20 characters, that would be an area I’d like to see expanded to 30.
It would be great if there were a way to do a Wildcard Keyword search to index similar words. For example Marx* would find Marx, Marxist, Marxists, Marxism. Ungh* would find Ungh, Unghh, Unghhh, Unghhhh and so on. Same with Title searches. Meanwhile, Search still works, one word at a time.
A list of all keywords in the database would be MOST entertaining and useful!