Knight Digital Media Center
Multimedia and Technology Training At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Multimedia and Technology Training At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Besides commenting on individual stories, many news organizations provide online forums or discussion boards where people can start conversations and post comments. Forums allow more control by users because they can pick the topics they want to discuss, rather than just responding to a news story.
For example, check out the dozens of online forums the Cleveland Plain Dealer hosts on its cleveland.com site.
Online forums have proliferated at many other websites besides online publications. Boardtracker is a search engine for finding online forums by topic.
But online forums face many of the same problems as allowing comments on stories and blog entries - offensive postings by a relative handful of disruptive people and postings by spammers.
The problem of off-topic and offensive postings and spam is one that has plagued the Internet for years. One of the Internet's original online forums - Usenet newsgroups - fell into relative disuse because of the volume of spam and "flame wars" on the newsgroups.
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