User:Haseler/Today
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[edit] Message board
The Today programme message boards starting in 2001 and was one of the most successful (albeit often controversial) political message boards on the BBC website. It grew in success until between 2 Nov 2005 and 10 November 2006 it had some 17890 separate discussion threads on the "Home News" forum, with one discussion on the "The strange logic of anti-war types" having over 3000 separate posts. In addition to the highly successful "Home News" forum there were four other forums with 2886 (International News), 2505 (The Green Room), 498 (Parliament) & 386 (Business & Economy) separate threads respectively.[1]
- Controversy
The management of the board has been controversial. Although the BBC have stated that their web based services are built "around user-generated content".[2] On 31 August 2004 the BBC closed their general debate forum: "The Great Debate" despite recognising that "The Great Debate has been very popular and encourages a high quality of debate".[3] Users were still able to initiate their own discussion on the other Today forums, but on the 9 November 2006 the BBC announced that as of 16 November (the day after the Queen's speech[1] which usually triggered enormous numbers of discussions on the board) it was banning user initiated discussion threads. The message annoucing these 'Changes to messageboard' to only allow messageboard hosts (BBC News journalists) to initiate new topics, did itself generate a huge discussion (some 511 replies in 4 days not counting the other numerous discussions that were initiated on the subject). Typical of the reaction to this change was:
"Yes it looks like they are only going to allow discussions to be discussed that they want discussed, inconvenient views that don't fall into line with the establishments won't be permitted." (i.moore)
"tough times coming up for the government - with criminal proscecution in the offing for the PM , and all sorts of inquiries into Iraq possible in America , and people coming out of the woodwork here to dish the dirt on dodgy dossiers etc, the BBC probably got cold feet about what people might be saying in months to come on these boards." (lucíllã døry)
However a minority of posters felt that:
"It's high-time the BBC did something like this. Many have noticed that Today's boards are too obsessed with anti-government propganda and Mulism-bashing....it is driving people away from them who may otherwise have commented and had things to say"(darryl)
Many users were already unhappy with the Today board resulting in several alternative message boards being set up such as JamesStGeorge & Freespeech. Some other users have changed to other boards such as the Guardian Newspaper's Guardian Talk.
