Hey peeps, Those of you recently in the LGBT News forum will have seen that the 5 recent threads created there were done by EC's account. This has been configured using an RSS Feed that is connected to PinkPaper.com, and every hour it will scan the feed for new LGBT news articles that it can post on our forum. Anyways, I am just wondering what your thoughts are on this? Previously news articles have been posted by members, but that has decreased lately which has caused the forum to slow down quite a bit, so I thought I would do a short experiment and see whether RSS Feeds would fit in there and make things a bit more active. Members are still free to contribute their own threads/articles, and the Feed is set up so that a maximum of 5 articles are sought at one time to avoid overloading the first page with recent news. At this point it's only a short trial to see what effect, if any, it has on the activity of the forum, but I would love to hear your thoughts on whether or not you think it should be a permanent feature on the site. Any thoughts are welcome. Martin.
That doesn't necessarily mean that 5 news articles will appear every hour of everyday. For most of the day it will probably only post a handful of news articles as they are published, but on the off-chance that PinkPaper published about 10 news article within the period of an hour then it would only post about the 5 most recent, rather than flooding the forum with all 10 of them. The setting is more of an anti-spam measure rather than an indication of how many topics we can expect to be posted per hour. Although if you still feel it's too high then it's very easy to change. The number of articles that can be posted per hour can be easily adjusted, as can the time frequency that the feed is scanned for new content.
I think if the topics it posted was a bit more refined, it would be better. An abstract or a paragraph from the article would be nice too, but that might be outside of the realm of possibility with what you are working with. It is a great idea, though.
The RSS occasionally posts threads about things that other members have already posted threads for. I like it aside from that though x3
I think it is a good idea... but can we do something about the fact that in the last day or two, we are seeing posts ranging from 3-4months old, to even a year or two old being necroposted, and it is getting kinda annoying, since some of them were from 2009-2010, and are no longer relevant.
Yeah, it's like Resident Evil: Gaypocalypse in there. So many zombie threads shambling around. I would just tell the person who is doing it to stop (I'm pretty sure it is the same person for each thread), but I don't think it's my place to do so and I'm pretty certain I'd come off sounding like a complete dick.
I would normally agree, but this is a forum for discussion, especially that forum in particular. Why should someone not be allowed to speak their opinion about a topic, just because it's no longer current? If anything, it might be smart (I know it's possible with vBulletin, as another forum I go do does it) to make it so after a month, all posts in the forum go to a subforum for non-current news articles. That way people could still talk about stuff, without bumping the thread in a forum people expect current events in.
