Summary

I'm not being lazy (at least not this time), but I typically check stuff at work and I can't go to most web links that are posted and discussed. So can I make a suggestion when posting random news stories, Instead of posting the link and saying "cool", or "I agree", could you give a few sentence paragraph of what you thought was cool or interesting to get the ball rolling?
Even if I was at home, I’m not a huge fan or reading, and if there is no indication of what the article is about, then I’m less likely to read it and get involved.
This might also help get more people posting on items since they don't have to read the 5 page article, they can simply post a reply to your thought and if it sounds interesting enough, they can read the article and bring other topics discussed...

/agree

Hyper agreed, very much an issue for me on dial-up. Even if it's just reposting what is said in the article, it helps. And you should technically link to the source, if you are posting the article verbatim, otherwise that is like plagiarism. 1 word posts are cute, but can be bothersome at times, since it eats up vertical reading space with nothing. [To Wes, maybe posts under 5 words or 1 line could be condensed to one line, with {author name, # words, click here to view} and no sig, no avatar, just text until 'click here' is clicked to reveal the full post]

Video and picture posts can be funny, but they have a habit of not working for me, so some way of indicating they are there ("video" or "pic" text tags at top left and bottom right to show size and location), and "click to load" features would be amazingly useful.

It would be hard to enforce and set up, but letting posters tag the post or topic as "funny" could help in sorting, and a "Work" sort button could hide all the funny, NSFW, and those kinds of things. It just relies on posters accurately tagging what they post.

Some good ideas here guys... by all means, keep 'em coming.

I DID notice (so not sure if it's new or not) that in places where you can see topics listed (like Recent Discussions and My Discussions) that mousing over the topic title displays part of the first post, to a limit. Awesome feature, gives a good impression of what the topic is about (something that titles cannot always do). Extending the limit would be nice for that. Also, if the right-side new posts could have that hover-over feature for that specific post, not the original post (currently hover-over does nothing btw), then that would make replies to new posts that much quicker and easier, I think. But maybe no one would use it or notice it. Possible, since I just recently noticed it in the first place.

Also, I've thought that it would be nice to have more frequent updates to the Announcements (currently talks about v6.0 ending). Mentioning updates to the website, like the new private messaging (awesome btw) or other features, would make them stand out more, and make people notice them more (again, PM is well done, very slick, but right-side text seems small compared to all that around it). Also, how logged-in users do not link to their profiles (it's currently just plain text) just makes PM that bit harder to execute when someone comes online or hasn't posted recently. Yea, you can type the name in, but who wants to do that?

I guess this IS more about making topics clear, and saving time.
Um, maybe having a forum of simply topics links? It's debatable if we would even need to allow replies, since that would probably just be like "hey, here's this story that's interesting, read it" and you can probably comment on the story page right there, instead of on the site here. It could be that you just post a link, and the topic is not only locked, but does not show up on the right-side, so no one gets confused.

Now that I think about it, a shout-box type thing for the site would allow an easier format for link posts like that, and allow more casual conversation about it, with posts not counting for points. And if you are just posting a link for points... well... no comment. But I like the idea of a shout-box here. It would allow for group conversation without the need for big formal topics and such.