Friday, November 20, 2009 5:41 PM
A new community feature: forums
This is just a quick note to let everyone know that we're experimenting with a new community feature at GlobeInvestor: discussion forums. If you've participated in discussion groups and forums at other sites, ours will be very familiar to you -- there are several forums, each with one or two discussion topics or "threads," and readers can post responses, etc.
In addition to being able to comment or reply to a post in the usual way, you can also flag forum posts as abusive, just the same way you can with our story comments. And there is one additional feature that readers don't have with comments on our stories: in the forums, you can click and "ignore" a specific commenter, which means that their comments will be hidden from you on all future discussion threads.
For a number of reasons (moderation resources being one of them) we decided to start with three broad categories of discussion: the economy, the dollar and the markets in general. We will be adding new discussion threads periodically, but at least for the time being we will be creating those threads ourselves, rather than letting readers create their own.
Feel free to use the "About These Forums" topic to suggest forum discussions you would like us to set up. We will also be monitoring the various forums to see where the discussion is going, and if there seems to be overwhelming support for a specific topic we will likely set up specific threads for those.
