News & Events

OpenFeint's News & Events forum is a global forum that centers around news pieces, upcoming events, and hot debates (usually religious debates) that sometimes leads to flamewars. If you are someone who wants to share the news, or prove a point, or tell when a major event is going to happen, then News & Events is for you!

What News & Events contains
News & Events is a forum for debates, news, and events. Here is a breakdown of what these are.

News
Let's take the Virginia earthquake of 2011 as an example. It was a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that struck the east US on Tuesday, August 23, 2011. It was an extreme oddity for that part of the US, which is more used to hurricanes and tornadoes rather than earthquakes. Now suppose you want to share this information with the OpenFeint community. You can't post it on Off-Topic. Not in Forum Games either. Even though you might reach more people with your information by posting the news in either of these two forums, these two forums are not the place to post news. No, the place you should go to to post news is News & Events. Here, you'll find a group of people such as TheAmerican, Hackey5, and others who are well-accustomed to this forum and will recieve and accept your piece of news and maybe debate about it. One thing when posting news: Before you post your news, you must check the N&E forum and see if somebody has already posted that specific piece of news that you have acquired and are looking to post. Failure to do this often results in multiple threads about the same piece of news, a common occurence in News & Events. To reduce the chances of this happening, you must periodically check this forum.

Events
For this section, we'll take the recent Lolapalooza music festival of summer 2011. It was a pretty significant event. Now suppose you want to tell OpenFeint about the upcoming concert when this specific band is the headliner. As posted above, you do not want to post it in Off-Topic or Forum Games. Well, maybe you can get away with posting events in Off-Topic, but we suggest you don't and post them in News & Events, where it is generally acceptable to post. Event threads are less common than news threads, so if you see one, rejoice. (Just kidding).

Debates & Flamewars
Most debates (of any kind) on OpenFeint occur here, on News & Events. Most of them are religiously oriented, with the Christians versus the atheists. We suggest, no matter what you believe, to avoid getting involved in these threads and to avoid shoving your beliefs down other users' throats. This could lead to a reputation decrease, or even worse, a swing of the banhammer. Some debates, depending on the topic and the nature of the debators, can lead to flamewars, all-out arguments filled with blackmail, slander, and virtual fights as the two sides of the debate try to prevail in their beliefs. No matter how hard these users try, flamewars never end in victory for either side. If possible, avoid all flamewars. Period.