I've noticed that on an increasing number of news items it's not possible to add comments in the usual way. The
"Forums: read more" link is missing and instead there is a link to
"Discuss this news story in the Forums". Following this link just takes you to 'My Forums' page.
(A recent example is:
https://www.ukclimbing.com/news/item/71223/toru_nakajima_-_beyond)
From a user perspective I can't see the point to this at all, and only see drawbacks:
Firstly from a user point of view this inconsistency is confusing. On some news items it works one way and on others it work differently. Inconsistency on web sites is usually seen as poor design.
Secondly it makes it considerably harder to comment on. You have to start a new topic and think of a title or cut'n'paste from the original article. Next you have to choose a forum - and you can't choose the most logical choice, the UKC forum, because only staff can post there. So whatever you choose the thread will be in a different forum from the other news items. Then you'll probably want to cut'n'paste the link to the original article too since that will be only way for forum readers to find it directly. All of this is a massive pain in the butt compared the normal method which just requires two clicks. And of course it will even worse on a mobile device.
Thirdly if you do start a discussion on a news item then there's no guarantee that other users coming from the original news item will find your post. They won't know the title is or what forum it's in. It won't necessarily be on their 'My Forums' page since that will depend on their custom settings. They also won't see it and if it hasn't been added to the past 24 hours or so it will probably be off the first page anyway.
All of the above faff means that users are likely to be put off commenting on such news items altogether. I certainly am. This seems a shame, particularly as forum traffic seems to be at an all time low at the moment anyway.
This issue seems anomalous to the rest of UKC which is generally consistent, logical and extremely well designed.
