[JJR512]

This isn't a problem or anything, but just some thinking out loud, so please bear with me.

My website is mainly about computers, or at least, that's how it's supposed to be. Computer hardware and software, tips and tutorials, stuff like that (although most of it is in development).

I have a forum on my board for sports, another for entertainment (movies, music, etc.), another for cars, and several computer-related forums.

I would like news from all of these very different types of topics to show up on the home page of the website. But in order to get news to show up there, it has to be posted in one specific forum, and not the forum it actually belongs in. Sure, with some of the other news hacks, I could specify to pull from multiple forums, but then everything from those forums gets pulled.

The problem with putting everything in one forum is that it then means two forums for people to check if they want the latest entertainment news, for example. Because a lot of people just come straight to the board, not to the home page of the site. Or if they want to see the comments that people make, it means going to two forums.

So what I'm thinking is that a completely different way of getting news on another page is needed. This is, I believe, a completely new idea. The old way is pulling all threads out of one specified forum. My idea is that you post news in the appropriate forum for that type of news (like putting movie news in the entertainment forum), and when you post, there would be an option, a checkbox, to make it a news item. Checking that checkbox, like the one to make a thread a poll, would flag that thread as one that should be displayed on the separate news page. Only Admins, or maybe Admins and Mods, would be able to use that checkbox.

This could even be taken a step further. Because news items can now be posted in all forums, the forum becomes like a category. For example, news items I post in my Entertainment forum are categorized as Entertainment news, and news items I post in my Sports forums are categorized as Sports news. This could be part of a search and sort feature on the separate news page. A user could click a link to show all the Sports news, or to search for something based on category.

All of this is just something to think about. I'm posting it in this thread because I think that of all the news page hacks I've seen so far, this one is the best. I realize it would be quite a lot of work to do something like this. But this is just to give you (merk), or anyone, something to think about, and maybe if you feel it's a good idea, work on doing sometime.