Reducing the news to links is good
Morrus is not happy with the thought that his site is considered a "news" site.
However, when you go the site, 90% of the words on the front page are news.
Is it any surprise that people consider this a news site? It isn't to me.
To solve this, all you have to do is give the same attention to the news as you do to all other content on this site. All other content, other than news, is a short description with a link.
It also isn't a coicidence that all sites I know of, that have won any awards, or that are from major content providers, also have a short description of news with a link to the full story. That's how you do a news item without a lot of clutter.
In fact, go look at any news site. Check out cnn.com, cnbc.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, yahoo.com. You will find that they ALL give a short description and a link, NOT the full article, on the front page.
Go check out any well-known fan-site as well. Check out some sports sites, like
http://www.nba.com/ , or
http://msn.espn.go.com/main.html . Check out the major comic book sites, or business sites, or even business-collapse sites like f*ckedcompany.com . All of them give you a short description, with a link to the full story.
That's why this site looks so cluttered all the time. I mean go look at the front page right now. You have reams of news all over it. Ryan Dancey's comment takes up an entire page of text by itself, yet many people may not care what Ryan has to say about Polite Use of the Open Gaming License. But if you do care, why can't you just click on the news item to pull up the entire article with the entire message?
If a change isn't made with the new site design, you will once again be dooming this site to a "industry news site" reputation. When almost everything you see when you go to the site is a news item, your natural conclusion will be to think of this place as a news site. However, if news were treated like all other content, with a short description and a link, then you would be portraying the actual content of the board in a more fair, representative manner.