Suggestion: [BREAKING] as forum-based timed option to news threads.
6 replies, posted
The term 'breaking' should really only be used for news that are still developing. A lot of breaking news spawn discussion far beyond the time they're actually breaking. This results in titles with rather shocking titles prefaced by BREAKING being shown on the forum front-page and in various tickers, despite the news in question nearing a week old. In this current age of bi-weekly school-shooting and thrice-weekly impeachment rumours, it can be rather hard to initially distinguish if a thread is about a currently breaking event, or just a ongoing gun-control circlejerk from a week ago.
With this in mind, I suggest that BREAKING be made an option for people who wish to post incomplete, developing news stories so it appears while it is relevant, then goes away on its own and leaves just the 'regular' thread title after a set amount of time; either something like 24 hours or 4-8 hours without an edit to OP. The latter option would also encourage the creator of the thread to update his original post, to allow latecomers to catch up more easily.
I think it would be better if no one used ‘Breaking:’ nor ‘BREAKING:’ at all. 9 times out of 10 it’s a relatively minor event, and the main purpose of news media putting ‘BREAKING’ in their news article titles is sensationalism to attract views.
Breaking, when used as intended, is a useful and good term. The problem is, it's more often than not used for news which are no longer breaking because the event described has passed and is no longer taking place. Basically, if information is still rolling in as reporting happens, it's breaking. If all information is presented at once and the thing in question is no longer developing, it is not. A tweet by Trump can't be breaking, a school shooting can.
It would be pretty cool to have some way of telling between 'this is happening right now' vs 'this happened yesterday'. Lot of dev effort for a fairly minor thing though
I think the old rules were that the mods decided if your news should be marked breaking or not.
BREAKING
PASSING
SOLVED
This is true, I'll admit. For a forum that can't even get linebr
eak formatting right, this might be a tall order
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