Bert,
I like the idea of the news forum, but noticed that it has two potential downsides...
1. Generally, when I check out the Bali Expat Forum (almost daily) I simply click "View posts since last visit". That gives me a list of all the latest topics and replies. In the past that's been easy to manage -- maybe a handful a day. But now with the news postings, I get a huge list of mostly news, and I find that I really don't want to sort through it all.
2. I like the idea of commenting on the news, but since there are quite a few posted everyday, I wonder if the online community is large enough to support more than one or two replies. Perhaps presented in a different format; for instance, there is an online news-forum here in Japan (
[url]http://www.japantoday.com[/url]) that I check out regularly, which gives a "teaser" of several news items on the first page, and a "discuss it" link for each one. It's a functional way to read the day's news and also see which stories are most popular in the online community.
On a side note, the most popular discussion this week on Japan Today is a quote "
Chinese women make much better wives than their contemporary Japanese counterparts." Anyone here want to chime in with another view...