Sincere thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts here. I’m happy to announce that we have a new category called ‘Is it true?’ that we will trial. Currently it is listed as a sub-category under MythDefied, where a lot of our myth busting and fact finding already occurs.
The difference with ‘Is it true?’ is that this category is focused on fake news, clickbait or otherwise misleading messages that can be found across all types of media these days. The full group description is here. We’ll be be offering the new Fact finder badge for those who provide answers in this category.
^^ I like this idea too. My only thought was that it might lead to the forum being used for news aggregation, and I think there is already a few sites/services doing this fairly well. However, I’m open to more discussion on the idea (and any other ideas people have, there’s no time limit on this thread).
Regarding the character limits, the Discourse software used to operate this forum does allow us to set character limits, but the limits will not distinguish between posts with URLS and without. Most posts are conversational, and setting a limit that would force commentary when posting a URL would create a high bar for those who wish to leave a short reply in posts that do no not contain URLs. We will have a look into the plug ins @benhelps posted above. It does create a dev hurdle for us, not that the plug ins are that hard to install but that sometimes they create other errors with our themes. Anyway, it’s certainly not insurmountable.
In the meantime, we can always encourage discussion by asking questions and adding our own points of view.
@ray15, thank you for the kind words. I can assure you that CHOICE staff wouldn’t threaten people anywhere online, but we do sometimes have problems with other groups either impersonating us or making false statements about our organisation. I think this may be covered in this topic thread here, but I’m always happy to touch base on the topic and discuss further.
Another idea that has been floated is a category to discuss ‘consumer design’. In this category we could go over the pros and cons of the design of products, from excess or poorly thought-out packaging to the useability of apps and websites. Would be interested to hear thoughts on this, and please keep the ideas coming.
