The news feeds are essentially a bog standard google news search (as any of us can do), turned into an RSS feed which is automatically pulled in by the forum and posted when new news articles appear in google.
The forum's automatic feed poster has some controls to limit the volume of news pulled in (so it can be updated every hour, six hours, day, whatever, and at the point of update only post a certain number of articles). Of course the quality of the feed is directly reflected by the quality of the initial search. If any of you can come up wit a suitable google news search then by all means we'll add or update the feeds as appropriate.
Regarding today's posts. I'm not sure. I did wonder if they should be excluded, but what happens when people comment on the news feed posts? They are a thread like any other in that respect. My initial feeling is that if they are there to stimulate discussion then they should remain, so long as they don't flood the "todays posts". If no-one posts comments against them they should drop off the bottom pretty quickly.
But yes, we can look into removing them from todays posts if we think they'll be too intrusive. I don't think we want a massive flood of news as that would defeat the purpose - we'd just end up ignoring them and finding them a distraction rather than a talking point.
