As anyone who has watched the DU forums, Greatest and Home Page over the last week knows, threads related to the Terri Schiavo case have dominated news and discussion. This is understandable, since this case and the actions it has set into motion have multiple major implications that go to the very basis of our constitutional democracy while at the same time engaging a wide and often violently clashing range of intense emotional reactions.
I would not want to restrain discussion about the Schiavo case, but I DO think we need to avoid the side effects of reducing coverage of all other important news and also driving a wedge between people who want the hundreds of TS threads and equally sincere people who oppose them.
I suggest a strategy to address this problem:A “Current Hot Topic” Forum
As I envision it, this CHT forum would have a changing title that would be set by the DU admins for whatever is a major center of attention du jour, for example “CHT: The Terri Schiavo Case.” For simplicity, I lean toward having only one CHT forum topic at a time, changing over a period of a week to a month depending on when the next major hot topic emerged, but this is a point that would need discussion; adding one or two additional CHT forums if they are needed is another potential option.Imagine the difference if the Schiavo threads could have been posted in a CHT Forum instead of all over the other forums:
- People who did NOT want to follow the story closely could simply stay out of the CHT forum. Threads from it would still have come to the Greatest, Home and possibly LBN pages, though with other important national and world news visible in the main forums, there would probably have been a lower proportion of them.
- Greater convenience in following the story, since the threads would be gathered together in one place. Depending on how stories from the CHT forum were archived, this could also apply to researching story aspects months later.
- Less thread duplication, since with topics listed together, a person thinking of posting a new one would be more likely to see pre-existing threads on the same subject.
- The angry arguments and alienation over the number of TS threads would have been avoided.
- Most of all, vitally important NON-TS national and world stories would not have been pushed aside into near-invisibility by the overwhelming numbers of TS threads.
Even if a CHT forum(s) were established, decisions would still need to be made on a number of points, such as the criteria used in choosing topics for it, how to archive CHT forum threads so as to make them more easily accessible as a group during searches, and how to integrate CHT forum topics with the LBN forum. (I lean toward allowing CHT threads into the LBN forum, based on my expectation that the reorganization would naturally promote a more balanced topic coverage there.) There might be more work for the mods in moving out-of-place posts into the CHT forum, though this could be lessened by the suggestion by DUer paineinthearse of a yellow-bannered admin message at the top of GD and GD-POLITICS citing topic(s) that are to be discussed
only in CHT. I would also hope that the number of misplaced posts would decrease as people became accustomed to the new forum division. Finally, there is the question of whether there should be only one or as many as two or three designated CHT forums allowed at a time. (Some of these choices might be restrained by what is doable with the DU site architecture.)
I hope that DU members and admins will express their opinions of the CHT idea and its variants and suggest others here in this thread. You may have some ideas that are better all around than the CHT forum concept. Please weigh in and discuss – but let’s not get blindsided again by what has happened to DU with the TS story. We need to keep watch on ALL important news while maintaining free, open and -- as far as possible -- constructive discussions.