News Portal

Michael, it's great what you're doing, but the sheer number of news items tends to crowd out the regular discussion topics. I wonder if it's possible to establish another separate section for straight news, or even combine the items. Or have a news sidebar as in Borisov's site.

I suppose what I'm saying is that your site design is perfect for forums, but doesn't work as effectively with news items.

Just a friendly observation.

Impressive. I like it. Mijow-san has a point about the crowding, but still this is a positive move.

I agree about the over crowding. But I wanted a way to make discussing current news easier, so it made sense to have the news feeds go into the forum system.

Thanks to Mijow's feedback, I've created not two, but four new forums to deal with news feeds:

• Pro Yakyu News - English News feeds about Pro Yakyu and Asian baseball
• MLB News - English News feeds about Japanese (and Asian) players in MLB or the minors
• プロ野球ニュース - Japanese news feeds about Pro Yakyu and Asian baseball
• MLBニュース - Japanese news feeds about Japanese (and Asian) players in MLB or the minors

I'll be setting up something on the side bar to suggest articles, and will probably be recruiting the more prolific contributors of you to submit them directly in the near future. (I've got to make sure the system is running smoothly first.)

I like it. I was a bit overwhelmed at first trying to take in all the changes. But I think it looks good and it's great to have that amount of news available.

Great work!

It looks better now. And creating those extra forums for news in Japanese is also a great idea.

Question -- since you have set up news portals, should individuals not post news they come upon?

Example: I post a link occasionally to a Nippon Ham article I read, but now that's most likely being covered in the news portals.

Post it. It's just as likely that I'll miss it (unless it's on one of the usual places I go to, which I think is rather clear now).

I'm still experimenting with the news portal. For example, there are a couple articles there that have gotten comments, so I've moved them to other forums so that they don't get barried. On the other hand, there are many news articles in the general News forum that get no discussion at all, and would perhaps be better off in the portal.

User suggestions for news is something that I want to setup soon. Very soon. Once that's done, I think that the flow will be more natural.

If you need any help in translations for your 日本語フォーラムス, glad to be of assistance.

I'd love to have some of the articles in the Japaense news translated (and placed in the regular News section). Especially the ones dealing with the Executive Committee, Players Association, etc. As you can tell, I'm not very strong with business Japanese, but I feel that this aspect is not being covered in English at all, so I do what I can.

In the end, though, it's got to be something that interests you. There are lots of categories that the English press is ignoring: Koshien, the current shakai tournament in Tokyo, the Yu-chan hype (which I'm getting an alergy to, but others might be interested), the semi-pro leagues in Shikoku and up north, etc.

So, just grab an article and run with it. Insert as much or as little of your personal commentary that you like. The more interested in the topic you are, the better the translation is, I'm sure.