I think some recent threads may have made it necessary to set some "unofficial guidelines" for the Politics forums.

A number of people have posted what seem to be some fairly self-serving summaries of news articles, as opposed to the article itself. I think we should encourage people to cut-and-paste the entire article in the seemingly favored "quote" format, as well as posting a link to the relevant article.

This way, we won't have so many "linky no worky" situations that really make any sort of an intelligent debate nearly impossible.

   

There's intelligent debate in the politics forms??

   

See what I mean?

   

I can appreciate your sentiment but I dispute the logistics. I personally feel that for many contributors it would lengthen their posts to almost unbearable breadth. Further, based largely on empirical evidence, I sincerely doubt that many of the links are even visited, as many debaters appear to “wave off” or disregard contradictory evidence as fabrications, propaganda or wholly out of context. Winning seems to be the nexus as opposed to the unfettered exchange of ideology.

Perhaps it would be more suited in the 'LXD' forum.

   

I've posted links as well as quotes at times, but it's not too hard to work around when people don't. Just find an uncommon sequence of several words in the article, put quotation marks around it, and pop it into Google. If that doesn't have it, try Google news. Nineteen times out of twenty, one or the other will do the trick.

Can't argue that it wouldn't make things a lot easier if the poster would just gave the damned link, but I'm pessimistic about the odds that most people will.

   

Encouraging users to bypass 'fair dealing' and purposely infringe on somebody's copyright is byfar a dangerous and selfish idea. There's no reason Trevor should open himself up to lawsuits.. Been there, done that.