QUOTE(thekohser @ Sat 24th March 2007, 1:36pm)
I know that WR's news grabber is just a robot, but is there some meaningful way that regurgitated "news" reports like this could be expunged from WR? Maybe it doesn't bother anybody else, but to me, I'd rather just see the original Wired article (and have that one place to comment on it), rather than all of these mirrors spitting out the same article.
I go through and consolidate similar articles into the same thread every 3-4 days or so. It seems to work out OK - having them lined up the way they're doing now, in this case, gives us some vague idea of how much "legs" each story has, though it's obviously not the least bit scientific...
It used to be they (i.e., my predecessors in this endeavor) deleted all but the first incoming story thread, but that caused three problems. First, there was no indicator whatsoever of the story's legs when they did that. Second, it tended to fill up the "Trash Bin" so that we couldn't find posts that had been deleted controversially amidst all the RSS stuff, and third (and most importantly), so many online news sites delete stories after a few weeks or months, keeping each post turned out to be a "massive redundancy" approach to being able to find the original stories after time had passed, without having to go back and re-check links for 404 errors manually.
Anyway, there's no way to do it automatically, and though I certainly don't mind doing it, we could give someone moderator rights to this particular forum to help out. I wouldn't want to do that unilaterally, but it's not like it's a glamor-job in any case!