Google News unable to include articles set up as posts or threads!

[GrendelKhan{TSU}]

ok.. did anyone else notice this? straight from the G-horse's mouth:
Google News (publishers) Help

google support:

Technical Requirements: Forum URLs
Google News is unable to include articles that are set up as posts or threads. For example, if a URL contains specifically one of these following substrings, then it will not be crawled:

• /board/ or /boards/
• /forum/ or /forums/
• /messageboard
• /showthread
• ?threadid= or &threaded

Please keep in mind that we're unable to include sites that don't have a formal editorial review process.

I don't know how much that applies standard SERP listings as well, but really makes one wonder. I'm sure it is doesn't mean nothing. And I certainly would like my articles or posts to appear as news too. It seems that WMW has made changes to their format for what's that worth.

I did notice a drop in PR and deep content crawls last yr... I wonder if has something to do with that.

vbseo rewrites cover the showthread and ?threadid part of this...but it would seem something needs to be done about the "forums" and/or "board" part of it.

Does this mean we all should be installing vb in our root folder? and /or renaming our forums root folder name to something other than "forum/s" to get around this?

is there a setting in vbSEO currently that might mitigate this?

this raises so many questions. ugh

[GrendelKhan{TSU}]

actually bunch of interesting info:
Technical Requirements - Google News (publishers) Help


I mean wtf with this?:
Technical Requirements : Article URLs - Google News (publishers) Help

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can't crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html. Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won't be able to crawl it. Please note, this rule is waived with News sitemaps.

is there a rewrite to make sure there are four digits?

and if our article is set like (as vbSEO has it):
http://www.mysite.com/forum/news/8710-article.html#post91889
are we screwed? cause that's two strikes (at least)... . used "forums", and article is numbered BEFORE the article title.

any get a crawl with on google news or regular serps for content in a post with that type of rewrite? (note again: a standard rewrite for vbSEO).