IMPORTANT: Updates coming to the Latest Breaking News forum

[EarlG]

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.

TITLE

This is the title of the news article you are posting. You should post the EXACT title of the article, without additional comment, and please do not post the title all in capital letters.

Example of a good title:

Poll: Confidence in Iraq war down sharply

Example of a bad title:

CNN -- POLL: CONFIDENCE IN IRAQ WAR DOWN SHARPLY!! (OMG, this is hugh!)

If the story does not exist online yet, you should provide your own short, descriptive title.

Example:

CNN just reported that confidence in Iraq war is dropping

LINK

This is the link to the news article you are posting.

Example:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/18/poll.wars

If you are posting breaking news and there is currently no article online, and therefore no link available, you may leave this field blank. However, it is good practice to return and edit your post to include a link when one becomes available.

SOURCE

This is the source of the original article. You should only provide one source.

Example:

CNN

EXCERPT

You may select up to four paragraphs from the original article to post. Usually the first four paragraphs will be of most use to readers. Please do not post more than four paragraphs. If you are posting breaking news and the story is not online yet, you should post a short description of the story in the excerpt box.

Example if story is not online yet:

Breaking: CNN is reporting that new poll results show decreasing support for the Iraq war.

Example if quoting from published news story:

Americans are starkly less confident and proud of their country's involvement in Iraq, according to poll results released Sunday.

However, the poll -- results of which were released on the eve of the Iraq war's 4-year anniversary -- also indicated that Americans are no more worried about the conflict than they were when it began in March 2003.

The CNN poll of 1,027 adults was conducted March 9-11 by Opinion Research Corp. The sampling error for the poll is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

According to the results, 35 percent of Americans are confident about the war, the poll said. When the war began, 83 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the campaign.

YOUR COMMENTS

You may add your own comments in this box. Adding your own comments is optional, but if you want to add them please use ONLY this box to do so.

Example:

Have you seen this poll?? OMG, this is hugh!!!

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 [e-mail]

[meegbear]

1. That is great!

:thumbsup:

[LiberalFighter]

70. Just used it for the first time today and find it brilliant!!

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!!

[maddezmom]

2. another excellent idea and update

:applause:

[maddezmom]

3. question, can we use the comment section

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

[Skinner]

7. I think that sounds like a great idea.

:thumbsup:

[Miss Chybil]

4. OMG! This is hugh!!!!111!!!!

:bounce:

[Eurobabe]

21. we're SO screwn!!

:rofl:

[Miss Chybil]

38. LOL!

:rofl:

[wakeme2008]

5. Looks good to me :)

:bounce: :bounce:

[Roland99]

6. Bueno.

[Rose Siding]

8. Looks good. A question-

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:

[maddezmom]

12. great question

:hi: I do that a lot. :)

[Skinner]

13. Clarification in parentheses will still be welcome. (nt)

[EarlG]

14. Edited

I see Skinner already answered this.

[goclark]

9. Yes! Thanks ,this will help a lot! nt

[mogster]

10. Good stuff

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

[mikelgb]

11. good move

[ozymandius]

15. What guidance can you offer for the beast that is the Stock Market Watch?

Thanks!

:hi:

[EarlG]

17. Best way to do it would probably be

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.

[ozymandius]

18. Thanks a bunch!

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

:thumbsup:

[EarlG]

20. Some fields are not required

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

[ozymandius]

30. What should I use as source?

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?

[EarlG]

32. The source

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."

[loudsue]

60. That's my very favorite LBN thread! Thanks Oz!

:applause:


:kick:

[geiger]

16. good idea; the dups were especially annoying last couple of weeks

[sinkingfeeling]

19. Like it!

[krispos42]

22. You want my opinion on this? Here it is:

[never cry wolf]

23. Question about the excerpt

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

[EarlG]

25. Good question

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.

[keithjx]

24. This is a welcome addition to DU. I have a thought:

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

[EarlG]

27. Well, I'd rather not get into it on this thread

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

[keithjx]

29. Fair enough. Just wanted to put the thought out there. Thanks for the reply. n/t

[redacted]

26. Like it, and how about a Developing Stories forum also?

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.

[EarlG]

28. The problem with doing something like this

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.

[redacted]

64. That's very cool Earl! Thanks for the tip!

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:

[wicket]

31. I love it!

:thumbsup:

[OhioChick]

33. If I am Understanding This Correctly...

{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)

[EarlG]

34. Yes, that would be fine

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.

[OhioChick]

35. Thanks.

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.

[EarlG]

36. Elad just fixed it (nt)

[OhioChick]

37. Thanks Again.......

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

[Ian David]

39. I hope you will please keep an eye out for how this format works with the RSS Feeds.

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

[Eugene]

40. Just bumped into the link size limit.

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

[Elad]

43. I increased the size for that field

Thanks.

[Eugene]

44. That was fast! nt

[guitar man]

41. Who's Hugh ??

:shrug:


(sorry, just being a smartass :) )

[Jack Rabbit]

42. I like to include the source in the title

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?

[Infinite Hope]

45. Thank Goodness. But some will inevitably be unable to resist injecting opinions into the title. n/t

[Name removed]

46. Deleted message

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

[Newsjock]

47. Is the four-paragraph limit now rigid?

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!)

[EarlG]

48. The mods will be enforcing the rule

the same way as they were before.

[Massacure]

49. Since there is a link field, it might not be a bad idea to make a script to check it for duplicates.

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

[EarlG]

52. We considered that

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.

[BadgerKid]

71. Question about dupes

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

[burrowowl]

50. Jolly good idea!

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

[Canuckistanian]

51. Good.

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.

[Rhiannon12866]

53. Terrific! I love this! Thank you!

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

[LiberalHeart]

54. Sometimes headlines are too long to fit the space. What then?

[EarlG]

66. You'll have to truncate the headline

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

[Lochloosa]

55. I don't like it and it's just another example of how far downhill DU has gone

Well....someone had to say it.

:sarcasm:

[Skinner]

57. Thank you for that laugh.

You made my day. :)

[Lochloosa]

63. ...

:evilgrin:

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

[NashVegas]

56. I Really Like How the Look of This Affects LBN Headlines

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

[flaliberal]

58. A comment from someone who hasn't been around for awhile

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!

[xultar]

59. Frackin awesome!

[Auntie Bush]

61. Question regarding use of all capitals.

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?

[EarlG]

65. Good question

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).

[leQ]

62. LUV IT!

[jannyk]

67. I'd like the source in the title as before...

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.

[Mika]

68. How do we deal with links that DU's software mangles?

Like this one, for example?

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

[LiberalFighter]

69. I would suggest including it on your own possibly in the excerpt section

[crikkett]

76. would a tinyurl be ok to fix links like that?

http://www.tinyurl.com

[muriel_volestrangler]

72. You can use the [link:www.....|Title] form with the new format too

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

[lonestarnot]

73. but, but, but

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

[DWilliamsamh]

74. I Like it, in this forum it's a good change (N/T)

[sakabatou]

75. Ooooo

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

[Renew Deal]

77. The improvements are terrific.

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