The Colorado Supreme Court just ruled 4-3 that Trump is excluded from running for office under the 14th amendment, Section three (disqualification clause): Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State,...

The Challenge Seeding is a clumsy process.    Source articles have very different structures, embed advertisements and other distractions, including at times complex HTML that screws up the formatting.  Time must be spent copying & pasting contents and then cleaning up the resultant mess in NT.    On top of that, the process of downloading an appropriate image so that it can be uploaded...

Comment Panels At the beginning of the comments section for each NewsTalkers article you will find a series of circular buttons.   These buttons each are a minimized representation of a comment panel.    These buttons represent, respectively, the panels: Tracker Panel – for navigating tracked comments Finder Panel – for navigating text found in comments Bookmark Panel – for...

Thread Basics NewsTalkers uses hierarchic comments to organize long discussions.   First level comments have integer identifiers (1,2,… n).   Second level comments have two integers such as 3.4 or 12.7.   The third and final level of comments have three integers such as 3.3.1 or 12.7.5. First and second level comments define threads.   A thread is defined as the first or second level...

Senator Daines has submitted a resolution to ban ' socialism ' in the USA.   In effect, this resolution is stating that any policy that can be labeled ' socialism ' is a threat. It is one thing for people to talk loosely about a term, but when a self-contradicting meme becomes the subject of a proposed resolution it is difficult to suspend disbelief that many of our elected officials...

Types of Articles NewsTalkers provides three types of articles:  discussion, blog and group discussion.   The discussion type is the most common - it is used to create articles (original or seeded) in the general forum.   Blogs are typically used by original authors who might syndicate their work from NT.   Group discussions are articles that are hosted within a particular NT group. In the...

Groups Have Grown Up NewsTalkers groups provide a forum for like-minded individuals to focus on a particular subject matter.    As an example, we could easily have a Chess group where chess aficionados discuss the latest in the chess community, analyze games, admire chess piece designs, etc.   The group members could informally communicate using the group wall (like a bulletin board) but...

Threads Comments on an article tend to split into threads of discussion.   A thread is a topic comment along with its set of reply comments.    The topic comment typically focuses on an aspect of the article and, properly done, the replies would do likewise.   The current hierarchic structure of NewsTalkers facilitates threads by organizing comments into a basic hierarchy as shown below:...

Moderators now have a support system to automate most of the manual work that has taken place behind the scenes.   The new system will be largely transparent to members - especially if one is never suspended.   Most of the new functionality will only be seen (and used) by the moderators. The most visible change to members will be the flagging icons (and behavior), the new moderation area and...

Why Do We Need A Publisher? NewsTalker’s underlying platform provides native support for three types of articles:  Blog, Discussion and Group Discussion.   Blogs are for authors (or columnists) to produce and publish original content.   Discussions, in contrast, are less formal.   A discussion can be original content or it can be a seed.   A seed is an article whose original content was...

One Newstalkers’ objective is a comment structure that encourages discussion and debate.   Oddly, many sites have resorted to strict linear comments 1, 2, 3, … n.  (In part because this is very easy to implement.)  Each new comment simply falls at the end of the list.   This works fine for small discussions but does not scale.   Very quickly, people lose track of who is responding to whom....

What is a Tracker? A tracker is a mechanism built within a discussion forum that tracks comment activity and presents a custom record of this tracking for each user.  The tracker is based on the idea that each user wants to follow activity on one or more articles (a discussion or a blog).   With a tracker, a user can quickly identify the new comments across all articles the user is...