Should we just rename the OT the "Freeper Lite Forum"?

[Static Universe]

This is annoying...

I post on several forums that have a policy that you can only post the first four paragraphs of an article plus a link.

This solves the problems of:
1) Posting whole articles is a copyright violation of some kind (I think).
2) Reduces server load
3) Keeps people from dumping a huge story and then commenting "How about that?"

Plus, the conversation is a little better since people usually go through the trouble to read the story itself and not just comment on the replies.

[Dinner]

I'm guilty of doing the paste and run, but, in my defense the threads normally still produce a large amount of discusion. Admitabely a summory might be better but if someone is to lazy to read a brief article then they probably won't meaningfully contribute to the thread any way.

[loinburger]

Freeper? I hardly know her!

[JohnT]

https://www.freerepublic.com

Of course, I don't think this forum is "conservative" based, but the convention of posting news articles and just having people reply to them has been a staple of theirs for over 5 years.

[Shi Huangdi]

Well, I am guilty of this some times. There are two reasons why I end up doing it:

1) I am really busy, so I don't have time to right up a large reply to the article myself to start off the discussion. There are sometimes major/interesting news events that I think would make for interesting discussions on Apolyton though, so I post the article even without the time write up a lengthy summary/analysis, and let the others pick up the disccusion if they think it is interesting.

2) Some articles you might not have that much say in response to what is happening. For instance there was a recent I article I posted about crackdowns in Zimbawe. I, as well as other people, replied to article with one line posts saying basically "Yeah, Mugabe sucks". In this case, I did so because I had no special insight to the situation as I am no expert on Zimbabwe, and I had figured that Mugabe's actions were pretty much indisputably wrong.

[monkspider]

Sorry John, I'll try to add more analysis to my posting of news stories, it is something that I am admittedly pretty bad at sometimes. (Not adding adequate analysis that is).