Yahoo News does have a wide array of stories from varying newspapers, and doing this puts them a step ahead of other news sites, and I applaud them for that. Though it seems to purposefully limit people's ability to use them. Yahoo News implemented an auto-refresh function for all news posted on their site some time ago, and it goes off every few minutes, 15 minutes or less. Sometimes it seems random, and other times it seems to go off at predetermined intervals.
This is horrible, as it can take several minutes to read a story and then write more than one sentence, check facts and spelling, or re-read your comment to ensure it says what you want it to. You know, the things you should be doing to be a good poster (and being a good poster is something they ask you to do). Whenever it refreshes, you lose whatever comment you were typing. And if you were reading a long story or even a series of comments, say starting at comment 276 out of 1000, you have to slog through the comments section to get back there or find your place again in the story.
I checked Yahoo's help section on the matter, and a consumer (not Yahoo) opened a topic on it. There is no way to turn it off for the news section, and based on what people said there (as some of them had complained to Yahoo), the company does not seem to care. When a company implements a tactic that prevents easy reading of the news on a news site, thoughtful and well-written discourse, or the reading of such discourse on a site that is supposed to have it, then it is not a company that should be used.
This is made even worse because it seems to assume either that if the user thinks there is a change in the story, they would not be able to refresh the page themselves, or that Yahoo just wants us to see many ads (because when the page refreshes you start at the top again, looking directly at a new advertisement), or maybe both. I can see the need for a refresh on a live feed, but there is never a need to automatically refresh every story every few minutes, causing you to lose your place in the story or the comments section, or to lose an entire comment you only started to write. Either way, it is a poor idea, leaving you either never sure if you can use the more in-depth news functions, or trying to figure out when the auto-reload might go off so that you read news and comment on someone else's timetable.
I know many people only skim stories, do not care about writing comments, only write brief ones, or do not read the comments. But for those of us who read comments, would like to be able to post comments, read and think through a long, in-depth story without losing our place, or just think that doing this makes sure that only really short comments of inaccurate spew are posted, this is a really bad idea.
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