Should VGC Have User Submitted News Articles?

[Nautilus]

I see it both working and failing.I see it failing if the objective of this project is to keep VGC up to date to news in general.I mean, people will soon get bored to make a long article due to the simple fact that making a thread/posting on the forum is much, much easier and faster.That IS the reason why news appear on the forums hours before the writing team can make an article about it.

But if this project is more complementing the news, in the sense that it was to make articles about something more complex, not just flash news, and giving the writing team some help in making either opinion articles or news in general, I can see this working.But it would need to have some rules in place.The first one would be the one you described, some users elected by the mod team to curate the articles made by the community.The second rule that I think it would be essencial would be to stablish a minimal number of time/posts/points that a user needs to have to be able to write articles, be it 6 months or 5000 points or something of the like.That would prevent people from making a profile just to spam troll threads and overload the curating team, or to have enough time to determine if the new user is not a troll/fanboy war-inducing user that would not add anything to the article other than flamming or trolling.And third reason would be a reward system, much like the DB one, to stimulate users to keep making articles.

Would be a nice incentive to make our community even stronger.Make this site differenciate from others, by having a community that can shape the potential of the site and making a name for yourself in the process

Edit.Read through most of the posts and thought of addicional rules.If you make an opinion article for example, you should be limited at minimum of 1 per month/1 per 2 weeks, so that users cant spam articles left and right with no quality.And as you grow in popularity, or in other words, as your articles gets "thumbs up"(I suppose a system can be put in place to quantify how many thumbs up you received across all articles), you are allowed to posts more articles/opinion articles, since you have more credibility, and the curator team have less worry about looking for quality articles/troll articles.That would also give more meaning to the thumbs system, and also give an extra incentive to the people that subscribe to the supporter program.(though I can see people abusing this to bully writers they dont like.But I believe the community we have now is a great and fair one)The only downside of all this system is that:1. We need good curators/editors.The users and potential interest is something I think we have.That is all there is left.And the time to implement the system of course.