Question about the Newsbot

**Tyrael** · 27th-September-2006

I notice that the Newsbot posts a lot of news which isn't slightly related to men's rights issues, sexism etc. Don't you think this is unnecessary and a waste of space on the forums?

**Marx** · 27th-September-2006

I've tried to limit the bot's input to only articles that include specific conditional keywords. However, quite often those same keywords are used in other context's - hence the apparent lack of relation. However, I do infrequently go through the bot's posts and remove undeniably irrelevent content.
One of the ideas of it was also to instigate the occasional discussion of a news item or two... That too seems to have gone down the pan.

**bola** · 5th-October-2006

I get the impression that when active threads get buried too deeply in the forum they are not read anymore by a lot of members. The newsbot aggravates this problem.

**Marx** · 5th-October-2006

The newsbot is limited in where it can actively post, thereby avoiding the most active areas - where the problem you outline is largely avoided due to fairly inactive forum section.
e.g. If the news bot was posting in 'general chitchat' I'd see your point, people go there on a daily - hourly- basis. The bot tends to post in 'news' where there is minimal activity by members. I manually delete of unrelated content to save the news forum filling with junk.

**Marx** · 5th-October-2006

The newsbot is limited in where it can actively post, thereby avoiding the most active areas - where the problem you outline is largely avoided due to fairly inactive forum section.
e.g. If the news bot was posting in 'general chitchat' I'd see your point, people go there on a daily - hourly- basis. The bot tends to post in 'news' where there is minimal activity by members. I manually delete of unrelated content to save the news forum filling with junk.

**bola** · 5th-October-2006

Quote from karl

The newsbot is limited in where it can actively post, thereby avoiding the most active areas - where the problem you outline is largely avoided due to fairly inactive forum section.

True, but it still affects the "latest posts" function of the top 10 stats, and also the "todays posts" function of the quick links menu. That's how I keep track of the postings. Otherwise you have to go through all the forums and subforums. I can't imagine many people do that. That's why a lot of posts remain unread.

Anyway, I thought that maybe you had activated the newsbot to generate extra activity, which doesn't seem to be necessary anymore.

Maybe we should develop a mod of our own, eh? When we have more time. To separate the newsbot better from the quick access lists.

**Tyrael** · 5th-October-2006

I think the Newsbot is quite unnecessary. I recommend that it's either deactivated or the amount of threads that it makes is reduced.

When a certain amount of active members is reached then they'll fill up the forums with enough interesting new threads.