I have already started the war on an admins forum and on my community, want a heated discussion here too

Nope, am not trolling, just want a serious debate

I see many forums add news in their content. RSS, article bots or just the admin copying news from Google, Yahoo, Ananova, or who else is willing to post them ...

What do you think about this? WHY would anyone post threads about things the members might not care about and where they can't reply other than to say "cool", "good info" and other versions of a post spamming.

I could go as far as considering this news addition as a "news spam" in the forums.

ideas? Opinions?

Well, mayb it isent trash. However the people that visits your site may have found that sorry peice of article youve gotten from someone elses site, an RSS Feed from your site or whatever, but the main thing is, its there and they visited your site becuase they found it from google or msn or yahoo or something. So for me? I would just doing what Im doing. I search for news on subjects I or my community discusses and look for the news thats similar to those subjects, hopeing that it will open some eyes. But belive me, you may not think itll bring some eyes, but there will be in the future, you just never know man, you should try it sometimes!

I will never try this

This could attract people in my forums perhaps, but what if next morning my members come and hit new posts and all they see (or a lot of this) is just those news? I am already putting them to hard times since I ask for quality posts and I enforce this as a dictator. How I can still keep my high expectations for them, but offer them just topics that might not interest them and they can't post something useful in a news bit, that's for sure. I tried to do this, and couldn't come up with too many "smart" replies.

I do have 1-2 topics in a week about new stuff or something that happened in the IT world, but these are just the most intersting news (events: like Bill Gates died or something like this). But my main concern is actual content created by my members. And in a forum with over 10 thousand posts there should be enough content to attract people.

But, as we say: we all have our own ways. Although I am not convinced to try this, I do love hearing you people come with your own side of the story and experience. This is what makes a good debate

On one of my forums I have a special forum just for news. I post about one news article relevant to my forum about once a day, and I encourage my members to post news as well. So far I've got nothing but positive feedback about the forum. As long as you don't spam news articles on all of your forums I think it can be a very good idea.

Article bots? Propably you show that to my forum right?

I have this option to my forum (some bots posting news to the site), but to pretend the spam feeling for my members, I have deactivated those posts in the 'Show unread posts' list.

I think it is a nice feauture of the forums, as members can actually read news from several sites, plus those articles are indexed by search engines and help with the traffic of the site.

Is this an discussion about having copied news on your site, or having it within the forum structure. Having News relevant to your community is a good thing, but using the forum structure to display it, isn't the most user friendly way of presenting it, unless you do some form of "featured threads". Personally i think it's a lot easier just to run some blog software, like B2Evolution, (just as easy as phpBB to set up, and has the same hosting requirements).