IMPORTANT: Updates coming to the Latest Breaking News forum

Hi everyone,

Today we are making some updates to the Latest Breaking News forum which will slightly change the procedure for posting threads. We are not significantly changing the way you post in the LBN forum, but these changes will require a small adjustment.

You will be made aware of the new procedure when you start a thread in the Latest Breaking News forum. The updated procedure is straightforward, but a full explanation is provided below for those who want to learn more.

WHY WE ARE MAKING THESE CHANGES

We are currently working on improvements to our home page, and we intend to create a section for Latest Breaking News threads. We would like to get these threads onto the home page as news comes in, which would be preferable to the current system where members have to wait for the Admins to sort through and then pick out just a few stories per day.

In order for this to work, we need to standardize the way Latest Breaking News threads appear.

As you know, most threads in the Latest Breaking News forum share these five traits: a title, a link, a source, an excerpt, and the thread-starter's additional comments.

However, currently everyone has their own style of posting in LBN: some people post the news source in the title of the article, some don't. Some people put the link to the article at the top, some put it at the bottom. Some people add their own comments to the articles, others choose not to.

So we are going to make it easy for all threads in LBN to appear the same way.

THE NEW LBN POST FORM

When you post a new thread in the Latest Breaking News forum, you will see the following page. As you can see, it's slightly different from the way threads are started in other forums.



Here is a slightly more detailed explanation of each section on the page.






If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in this thread. Also, as with any upgrade to the forum software, it's possible that you may run across a bug or two. If you find any bugs, you can report them in this thread or send them directly to elad@democraticunderground.com

:thumbsup:

Didn't know about it until I posted.

Usually don't post LBN especially this late but had to check to see if a couple articles in local paper had been posted.

Again... BRILLIANT!!

:applause:

to add additional links and stories that backup or are companion articles?

:thumbsup:

:bounce:

:rofl:

:rofl:

:bounce: :bounce:

Are we to no longer put any clarification in parentheses? Sometimes articles are titled so poorly, that a note of additional info is really helpful.

Examples:

"GOP Gave Joe (Lieberman) A Boost"

"Zimbabwe opposition spokesman attacked (Nelson Chamisa)"

"Schumer: Gonzales unlikely to survive(people at DOJ want info to come out)"

Thanks :hi:

:hi: I do that a lot. :)

I see Skinner already answered this.

Especially separating comments from news content. Both is very interesting to read, but as a 'news' OP you'd always prefer the sober facts.

Thanks!

:hi:

to put the whole thing in the Excerpt box and leave the Link box and the Your Comments box empty.

The Stock Market Watch thread is the only thread in LBN which is excepted from the regular LBN rules. I'm sure we can work out a way to accomodate it into the new system.

I was worried that leaving fields blank would null the post.

:thumbsup:

The fields which are required are Title, Source, and Excerpt, so you need to fill those to make it work.

The page is a compilation of data from several sources. For instance, will the post fail if the source does not begin with a http:// tag?

The Source is different to the Link. The Source shouldn't be a URL, it should be something like "Associated Press" or "MSNBC" or whatever.

In the case of the Stock Market Watch thread, the source could just be "Democratic Underground."

:applause:


:kick:

Are italics, bold, different font size or color allowed to be added by the OP or are these considered additional comments?

Personally I find it pretty annoying when people change the color - or especially the font size, ew - but it doesn't really matter if the OP wants to add italics or bold to the excerpt. The bottom line is that doing this will not affect our main reason for making this change, which is home page compatibility.

Perhaps one way to handle this would be to simply include "Emphasis added" in the "Your Comments" box.

Since you are considering changes to the homepage, here's my thought. Why the 10 most recent threads are shown in the top right corner? When I arrive at DU, I see these great headlines down the middle, usually a centerpiece for the day (like today's GREAT top 10), but the Greatest Threads are listed down some, while the 10 most recent threads get top billing in the corner (and sometimes have fun topics like "OMG!!! My ant farm just fell off my bookshelf! Ants are everywhere!). While I agree the great ant catastrophe of '06 is important, the Greatest Threads usually have more pertinent information.

Just my $0.02. Thanks for all you do!
KJ

but we have a lot of ideas for improvements to the home page. Featuring the Greatest threads more prominently is one of them.

Here's the concept: The software limits threads appearing in LBN to only those posted within the last 6 hours or so. Then the software automoves LBN messages older than 6 hours to a Developing Stories forum.

This approach would circumvent the frustration many of us frequent DU users experience when we expect breaking stories, but have to dig through non-breaking but popular or highly controversial threads still languishing in LBN, some stories as old as a few days, in order to find news hot off the wires.

is that it would make people hunt through two forums. I can also see it being a problem if you're engaged in a discussion about a breaking news story and then it suddenly got moved to a different forum and you had to go look for it.

Here's a tip though: if you want to find the breaking stories in LBN, go into the forum and look at the top of the column which lists the time and date that the threads were posted. If you click the link which says "Start time," it will re-sort the threads in the order they were posted, putting the most recent threads at the top of the page.

And it saves state from one session to another so we don't have to resort on each login!

Very cool. Big thanks indeed!

:yourock: :yourock: :headbang: :headbang:

:thumbsup:

{According to post #'s 13 & 14}, Titles such as these would be okay with parenthesis?

All US Jobs to be Outsourced (to India)

or:

Company X to Layoff 95% of Workforce (55 Million Jobs)

As long as the parentheses are there in order to clarify and not to editorialize, then I don't see a problem. Hopefully it won't be necessary to do this too often though - we'd prefer it if people would use the exact title of the original as often as possible.

Having a problem here and don't know what. Any ideas?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2772575

Also: Feel free to delete that thread and I'll try again later.

on edit: Disregard. Seems to be working suddenly.

Most seem to only want to pick up 2 paragraphs with no comment.

Few things are more annoying than reading an RSS feed where the entire first paragraph is nothing but unreadable html tags.

URL's from reuters.com, newsday.com, and latimes.com can get extremely long.

These two examples would not fit:

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-germany-italy-cia-kidnapping,0,5888277.story
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-germany-italy-cia-kidnapping,1,4118663.story

Thanks.

:shrug:


(sorry, just being a smartass :) )

Look at these two tiles in that format:

FoxNews: Clinton the father of Anna Nicole's baby

BBC: Clinton the father of Anna Nicole's baby

Which one would you take seriously?

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

I believe that the previous rules allowed some slight leeway, particularly for newspaper reports, which are notoriouos for doing just one sentence per paragraph at times, especially where quotes are used.

(This is an outstanding improvement to LBN, though!)

the same way as they were before.

If you have a script check the link against the link fields in other threads, you can prevent duplicates.

But we figured that such a system would not be able to eliminate the problem of dupes, because the same news story is frequently posted by multiple news outlets. Therefore the end result would probably be that the problem would still remain, but people would become lazy about checking for dupes themselves because they'd figure the software would do it for them.

Is it considered inappropriate for regular users to alert the mods about new duplicate articles?

I like it.
Will this eliminate dupes, since tiles, source, etc. are the same? If so great!

I've always liked the restrictions on LBN. It should be strict.

Otherwise, we would be accused of personal (or political) bias.

This way, we're perceived more as impartial messengers of verified journalistic stories.

For what it's worth.

Makes my job here much easier... :woohoo:

We'll leave it to the poster's discretion to shorten the headline appropriately if it's too long to fit our format.

Well....someone had to say it.

:sarcasm:

You made my day. :)

:evilgrin:

Oh Damn...I owe you a donation....

It puts the emphasis more on the story/headline and less on the source.

I took a break from DU after the '04 election.
Prior to that, I believe I was on for around a year.

The site has been greatly improved since then, and I
want to congratulate the admins on your great work.

Keep up the good work!

Somewhere above you said NOT to use all capitals. If the title or information is printed/used all capitals...do we have to rewrite them in small letters or can we use the capitals?

I understand that if you're copying and pasting from elsewhere and the original article is printed with an all-caps headline, it's a pain to have to re-write it. At the moment we're not planning on trying to enforce a strict no-caps rule, but we'd prefer it if people could voluntarily avoid all-caps headlines (unless the caps are necessary to the headline for whatever reason).

the rest of the changes are very good, but I like to know if the source is the NYT or National Enquirer before I click to read.

Like this one, for example?

http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7B9C7CF814-8AD6-453C-B924-9FE174F5E0A2%7D)&language=EN

I just tried it. This often works when using the plain URL goes wrong.

I :scared: to post in LBN, so I never do. I read it daily though.

That looks a lot better for those who post here a lot.

I know I am late to the party, but the improvements are great. Nice work!