Current Affairs

[Chippiewill]

At some point some level of control needs to be exerted. I have noticed a recent trend, primarily with Dan's threads, of editorilisation of titles in a manner that does not reflect the original article, formatting intended to mislead people into believing what are in reality his comments as part of the original article and in-line (aka not after the article), political commentary added to articles. This style of formatting is HEAVILY misleading for forum users and portrays his opinions as facts or as opinions of respectable media outlets.

I'm am proposing a small number of very reasonable forum-specific rules that are in place in other forums and outlets such as Reddit. This would be for threads which are centred around an article:

- Titles should not be editorialised (aka edited, except shortened to fit in the limit). In the event there are multiple articles on one thread being posted the title should be concatenated or edited to combine both in a manner which reflects the original tone of the titles with moderators taking a final call on whether it is acceptable and editing it if required.
- The source should be given in one continuous segmented, unaltered except to truncate for lentgh, without addition of commentary, in one quotation box per source with a link to the original source visibly placed directly preceding or following the source. None of the source should be placed outside of the quotation box (Which is a rule which is not always entirely enforced), except for images. Any images used should come from the original article.
- Any commentary should be placed at the end of the post after the articles and formatted in such a way that it cannot be construed to be part of the article.

These rules would be strictly enforced for political threads, loosely enforced for celebrity gossip type stuff and enforced somewhere in the middle for everything else.

[Aiden]

I agree. You have mine and Barry's vote. NO WAR BETWEEN US TODAY!!!!!

[Kardan]

I agree, although I'm not entirely sure that forum management will see it the same way (More work for them I guess ).

I mean, editorialised headlines are essentially the same as posting fake news from the Onion - and that gets moved to spam...

[Sian]

I'm not gonna lie! I don't tend to check that the headlines are altered, I would have thought Dan would post them as originally written. Honestly though, if members find it a big problem and Phil understands you guys as well, I don't mind extra work.

It may take a bit of proper structuring though.

[Inseriousity.]

Quite frankly, Dan's method is what sparks debate. If you disagree with his widely exaggerated headlines, his political commentary, his opinion then just do it in the thread. It's just a forum, not the BBC.

Alternatively, just do what you did before and post anti-Dan threads (all those anti-UKIP threads you posted, for instance).

[FlyingJesus]

I don't have a problem with it because I do this thing where I read the words that are written and from that can see what the real story is. I have a problem with his "debate" method of ignoring the important stats and talking about something completely irrelevant, but he's not the only person who does it by a long shot

[Phil]

I'm not sure about this right now. I'll take some time tomorrow to look at some of the threads and see exactly what you mean.I kinda see what you mean by the titles part. Only last night I saw a title and thought "That looks more like an opinion than a headline"

[Lewis]

I do agree with this, although I don't really view current affairs much.

[GommeInc]

I don't have a problem with it. If the article is altered it is usually obvious. It sparks debate, too. Going by memory the articles which have an opinion bolted to them tend to gather the most responses and interest, unless it goes beyond a certain point where it echoes an opinion too much and gets ignored. Threads which just have an article attached to them don't really exist so it's hard to do a comparison,

[-:Undertaker:-]

You'll not be editing any of my comments or threads, period.

Quite frankly, Dan's method is what sparks debate. If you disagree with his widely exaggerated headlines, his political commentary, his opinion then just do it in the thread. It's just a forum, not the BBC.

Alternatively, just do what you did before and post anti-Dan threads (all those anti-UKIP threads you posted, for instance).

Hooray, somebody gets that I post things to spark debate as opposed to get you all to agree with me.