Separation of OP policy between Opinon forum and News forum

Can I just make a suggestion that the policy requirements for an OP be different depending on the forum you are in?

My issue is mainly with having to write a comment as well as a link to the article in the OP. Because once you write a comment it instantly becomes an opinion piece. What if we just want to share an article and hear what others have to say before weighing in on it. It just seems like there is little difference between the current event forum and the political opinion forum when you force the OP to inject their opinion in the Current Event forum.

 

Depends on what you write! The rule about thread creation says this (my added bold/colour):

You could simply ask open questions which bring out some different possible angles on the piece for discussion and debate, without having to 'prejudice' them by answering them yourself in the OP. Obviously there needs to be a little more to them than just 'what do you think about this?', but it's not difficult to do - just think about what your thought are, and what you'd like to discuss that relates the the story, and ask a few questions (and/or mention some different aspects of the story, what other things it could relate to, be caused by, have an effect on, and so on, but put in the form of 'Do you think....or....?', or 'What about....and....?', rather than 'I think'). It should be easy enough to structure questions which don't prejudice the discussion, and include the kind of aspects that various 'sides' may want to bring out.

There just needs to be something to start the discussion going in the right tone and direction, or from experience we know that they very often end up not being discussions, but strings of one liner nonsense (often barely related to the original story that the OP wanted to discuss, which can cause bad feeling, accusations of 'trolling', consequent mutual rule violations, and so on - it's not easy for people to stick to the topic if the OP doesn't actually set out what topic they want to discuss in the first post!) - that is why we have that rule. It doesn't have to be an 'opinion piece', though - questions can also quite easily be 'sufficient elaboration to establish a foundation for respectful discussion and debate'.

 

I think one of the reasons so many threads get dragged off topic so quickly is because there is no focus of discussion in the OP. A link to a particular news report in itself might raise a whole slew of issues that the OP wasn't thinking about when they posted it. A brief overview of the aspect of the article the OP is interested in discussing and a question or two to open it is a perfectly reasonable requirement.

It is, after all, exactly what you did here.

 

I'm not so sure. I think not posting anything in the OP encourages one to actually read the article.

I used to attend a forum that had a strict policy in the opposite direction. You were not ALLOWED to post in the OP in non opinion forums. The OP was just a link to the article and a quote snippet from the article. The Title was required to be the exact title of the headline followed by the date of the article.

Then the user could make a second post with an opinion if they wanted to but the point was that the OP was a sourced article. Not just a rant.

It worked out pretty well for that forum.