I was looking for a thread on the Cornell fraternity rape news story, and realized there is no longer a group/thread category covering that kind of story. I propose a new one called “Ripped from Today’s Headlines!”
There is a “breaking-news” tag.
I mean a category on par with “Great Debates” or “Cafe Society.” It used to fall under “General Questions” but the successor category doesn’t cover this sort of topic anymore.
MPSIMS & the breaking news tag is tbe modern replacement.
The categories are now much more about the differing rules and mod behavior rather than they are about the content
Tags make up for a lot of that. If you don’t use the tags features your missing out.
Tags are really cool and very underutilized. They help let people know what kind of thread it is before even opening it, and help people search for specific kinds of threads. (You can also “mute” tags if there are kinds of threads you just never want to see.) I know I’m guilty of not using them enough (though to be fair, I probably don’t create that many threads).
Not really. Not as it’s defined here. The breaking news tag is supposed to be for rapidly developing stories that are commented on as they happen. I won’t repeat what is already covered in the pinned post about the subject.
Using the “breaking news” tag would not be appropriate in the Cornel case. It’s being reported now but it happened 2 years ago. Although reactions and updates will continue to happen it’s not an unfolding current incident. More importantly for those participating, putting the breaking news tag on a thread does make the moderation on the type of discussion much more strict. That’s necessary on the types of threads it’s designed for but I don’t believe it fits in this case. Deeming it breaking news would curtail pretty much all of what anyone wants to discuss about it.
Whether or not there should be a different type of tag as the OP is discussing is a question for someone else. I don’t use them or really pay attention to them so that’s better left to those that do.
I don’t feel like “miscellaneous, pointless stuff” is an appropriate descriptor for “hard” news stories, which are as deserving of a category of their own as political posts or entertainment posts, which do unambiguously have their own categories. We had one under General Discussions and now we don’t.
By “General Discussions”, do you mean Factual Questions? Because I don’t remember a General Discussions category.
Well you’re in luck, because that isn’t what MPSIMS is. It is “miscellaneous and personal stuff”. The news stories fit under the “miscellaneous” banner.
You might have missed the big discussion about the name change, because it did not reflect how that category was being used. (The news stories were a big part of that change.)
That category used to be called “General Questions” or GQ until it was decided to rename it as well, because the original name was too generic and didn’t properly reflect the focused nature of that category.
Okay, but “mundane, personal stuff” is more for discussing my bunion treatment than high profile crimes and prosecutions.
The word “mundane” doesn’t appear in the category name at all.
“Miscellaneous” is a catch-all for stuff that doesn’t fit well in any other category.
Still think it’s a miss, but I appear to be the only one.
One thing that is different from 10 or 15 years ago is that SDMB has far less traffic. Fewer readers, fewer posters, etc.
We’ve had various other discussions about making other specialized fora / categories in the past. Management has always come out strongly in favor of fewer categories that show more traffic per day, rather than a lot of categories, most of which are dormant on any given day. Lots of categories makes it harder for folks to find the fresh content. Unfound content is no better than non-existent content. Fresh content is what keeps messageboards alive. Absence of fresh content is what kills them.
We are sadly approaching the time when we’ll fall below critical mass and most of the lurkers and many of the posters will wander away from the largely empty party. Might be 10 years, might be 5. But whenever it is, management wants to delay it as long as possible.
The thing is that a “ripped from today’s headlines” category would need constant thread closures or moves, as the topics age out.
A better name might be “Hard News,” as opposed to sports news or entertainment news; A-section news stories that aren’t explicitly about elections or politics.
I think, like me, you suffer from memory problems. We remember what the category used to be, and are still trained to view it as such. I too, remembered the name as “Mundane and Pointless . . .”
But the categories have changed, and us old fogeys will just have to try and keep up. 
I agree. Tags are very useful, both for narrowing down searches and for telling you what threads with ambiguous silly titles are actually about.
This was a great initiative that @What_Exit took upon himself shortly after we migrated to Discourse. I humbly admit to whining about why he was doing this, for reasons that I can no longer remember, but obviously I was being a dumbass.
And yes, I concur that the “Breaking News” tag suffices for what the OP has in mind.
You aren’t the only one, but many of us remember the long drawn out discussion about a more appropriate name, which we couldn’t agree on, and since many posters reflexively called it MPSIMS anyway, The Powers That Be determined that changing Mundane to Miscellaneous was the least objectionable solution.
Also, “Pointless” was changed to “Personal”.
You remember what the forum used to be NAMED, not what the forum used to BE.
The forum was named “Mundane and Pointless…” but the description of the forum has always made it clear that it was a general purpose forum for all things great and small, not just for mundane things.
Originally, the description for MPSIMS was “For general chatter, great thoughts, etc”.
Somewhere between 2004 and 2006, the description changed to “For general discussion: from frivolous chatter to deep thoughts; from harmless diversions to life-changing announcements.” This has been its description ever since.
Apparently, there are quite a few folks here who don’t care what the forum description says. They only care what the forum title is. You would think that the change from “Mundane” to “Miscellaneous” in the forum title would appease these folks, but apparently not.
I have to admit that I personally do not understand why so many people get hung up on the forum title when the description of the forum has always indicated what the forum was about. I also don’t understand why so many people think that the forum’s purpose is or has been only for mundane things. That was never the forum’s sole purpose.
If you go back to 1999 and read what the posts are, they are everything from “My cat, the transexual” to discussions of movies and rock bands (the Cafe didn’t exist yet) to “Cleveland Train Stabbings”. Some are clearly mundane, some are clearly not.
There’s also a post from September of 1999 complaining about gas prices going up to $1.39 a gallon. How times have changed. How dreadful that gas prices should go over $1 per gallon!