Yeah. It’s a reasonable discussion to have. But, right now, I’m not sure who has the authority (either administrative authority or moral authority) to actually change a forum name or create/spin off a new forum.
The folks who have administrative authority to do so are very busy at the moment with other things.
I agree with your idea completely. If I may as a ‘self-professed newbie’ (there’s a wry 
after this last thing).
Agree completely with these two esteemed posters. Now’d be an excellent time to put this change into place.
Just over a week ago I launched a thread about the then-impending Hurricane Isaias intending that we could discuss its progress, our preparations, and if necessary our response to the disaster as it befell those of us in the path from the Windward Islands to the Canadian Maritimes. The thread, like the storm, was a bit of a damp squib. But that was unknowable when I posted.
And I dutifully put it in MPSIMS while thinking just how inappropriate that forum was, despite that being the TPTB’s guidance for news threads. And so the thread began with the semi-obligatory disclaimer:
Neither mundane nor pointless, but …
When we routinely start threads whose first sentence amounts to “I know this is the wrong category but it’s the closest we have”, there’s something wrong with our categories.
Further on @Riemann’s meta-point about Discourse enabling things that vBulletin could not. …
Discourse is much less category-centric. One can choose to view the flow of posts and and topics through the category mechanism or one can view them across the board holistically via the latest & unread features.
Yes, there is a danger to an excess number of too-finely divided categories. But I submit that Discourse’s design reduces that risk. Which alters the terms of the trade-off in favor of a “News & Discussion” or “Current Events” category. The fact it was judged not-really-worthwhile under vBulletin does not mean that’s still the right answer under Discourse.
The last challenge will be how to distinguish between "political" news that belongs in Politics and Elections versus "non-political" news that belongs in News & Discussion.
A fine example of this challenge is a topic posted earlier today that the NY AG is suing / charging the NRA’s executive leadership with fraud, embezzlement, etc. It may be news and it may be current, but almost immediately the discussion broke down along LW vs RW lines.
The board already has two recently added forums for specific categories of current news events; The Quarantine Zone and Politics and Elections. So I feel there’s “room” for a forum for general news discussions.
Where would we put something like the death of a poster, General News or MPSIMS? Or the death of a family member, or a pet? Again, neither mundane nor pointless, but not “general news”, either. Breaking out a general news category still doesn’t solve that problem.
There is an In Memoriam thread in the MMPTIMS category if that suits your news.
I don’t happen to check it very often. I don’t know if others do. I always want to know in the daily posts if a fellow mumpers has lost a beloved pet so I can acknowledge that.
IMHO, FWIW.
No, the In Memoriam thread is not really for announcing, but for keeping a central listing.
Thank you for the clarification. I’m still learning the customs and traditions, the organization of SDMB. To the newcomer it isn’t always transparent. I’m working hard to fight my ignorance but it’s taking longer than I thought.
I really like the suggestion to just change the name to “Meaningful or Pointless,” that way you can keep the initials the same but better describe what the forum is for. I don’t like the idea of a “News/Events” forum, that will just get taken over by politics.
Some of you guys are arguing the forum Title, which is not the problem per se. It’s that somewhere back in another century, someone decided that this was going to be the forum for Breaking News/Current Affairs. Poor choice IMHO, but it is what it is.
The solution is not trying to find an all inclusive name, which let’s us shoe-horn incompatible topics into the same container. It’s splitting the content. When TPTB have a few minutes somewhere in the future to change things, and if there’s a strong consensus among hoi polloi that a change is needed, I propose one of the following.
- Move all M&P to IMHO. I never understood the need for two fluffy fora. Rename MPSIMS to something more accurate.
- Move news and current affairs to IMHO (the purpose of which seems to be GQ/GD/P&E light, now with polls!) while at the same time encouraging the fluffier stuff to leave for MPSIMS.
- Or, and this is what I would do, pending blessings from the Mods: Put Breaking News and Current Affairs in QZ, for the time being. Enforce a strict No politics rule and rename it once this C19 hell is over/abates. “That’ll be confusing for newbies!” Yeah. And going to MPSIMS to read about cataclysmic events isn’t? Label the description clearly.
There’s already a politics forum. We can simply have the same rules about politics as we already have in the QZ. The news threads are some of the most interesting ones to me - but we don’t get many non-political or non-covid ones.
Rather than “meaningful” how about “momentous”?
“Momentous to Pointless Stuff I Must Share” preserves the acronym and implies a range of topics from, well, momentous to pointless.
I’m also good with just “Stuff I Must Share”.
That’s a terrible idea. I don’t want to read about COVID. I do want to know what other breaking news events happen. The Beirut explosion has nothing to do with coronavirus.
Did you read the rest of my post? I’m asking because for this perspective it doesn’t seem as if you did. With the way things are moving here, and given what e_c_g stated in this thread, a change will not conceivably happen for at least a few months.
Hopefully, by the end of the year C19 will be a thing that we see through a rear view mirror, or at least approaching that. Re-naming and archiving an existing forum should be easy enough.
But, by all means, if you think disastrous events fits better with kitten memorials than the effect of a pandemic, then YM_obviously_V
I don’t know what you are talking about. The Quarantine Zone is for discussion of the pandemic. It makes just as much sense to say “Put breaking news threads in Cafe Society for the time being.”
As I was scrolling through the thread, I thought to myself, “Why not just change the words but keep the acronym?” About two seconds later I came across needscoffee’s post. I like it, but I’d suggest the slightly-snappier “Meaningful/Pointless Stuff I Must Share.”
The thread may have been a squib, but the storm was not, at least here in Connecticut. The center of the storm passed to the west of us, which is very unusual. (Hurricanes and tropical storms usually get pushed to the east by the prevailing winds before they hit us this far north.) Anyway, the storm track for Isaias put us on the windier side of the storm, which was made even worse due to the high speed of the storm itself as it raced north at 15-20 mph.
The bottom line is that well over half the people in Connecticut lost power. This has been one of the worst storms for power outages in state history, worse than Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 2012. Over a million customers lost power here in Connecticut, and as of this writing, six days after the storm, 145,000 customers are still without power.
The day after the storm, our electric utility Eversource was saying that “the impact Isaias had on the electric system is greater than Superstorm Sandy, and customers should plan for multiple days without power as crews work through extensive damage to make repairs.”
I work for a large sewer and water utility, and our facilities were running off of emergency generators for three days after the storm. Some people in the state aren’t expected to get power back until Tuesday or Wednesday (a week after the storm).
P.S. My last post (in response to @LSLGuy upthread) ended up being longer than I’d intended. While I did link to this post in the Isaias thread, I should have just posted there in the first place—sorry for the digression here.
Ditto.