The return of removed sections!

[The Don]

Spam is more of a sub forum with all the 'old timers' down in it. In spam you can post basically anything aslong as you abide the rules, discuss anything is a good forum, lots of interesting topics and conversations come up in it and you can't just post "Eating a muffin" surely that's spam worthy. It's the way people treat the forum, I have seen many interesting topics in that section and I think it is one of the most active forums so it would be pointless removing it as it would loose a lot of posters.

[GommeInc]

I just had a look at Discuss Anything and I'm confused with this belief that it's just a spam forum with posts :/ It seems quite tame compared to the Spam Forum, so I'm not sure where this idea has come from. Discuss Anything needs to be better moderated, like things that really do not belong in other forums get moved there. So far it seems the forum relies on member moderation, where members themselves have to look at other forums, when that should be common sense anyway.

[AgnesIO]

I just had a look at Discuss Anything and I'm confused with this belief that it's just a spam forum with posts :/ It seems quite tame compared to the Spam Forum, so I'm not sure where this idea has come from. Discuss Anything needs to be better moderated, like things that really do not belong in other forums get moved there. So far it seems the forum relies on member moderation, where members themselves have to look at other forums, when that should be common sense anyway.

It has improved a bit, but at one stage it was 'What colour is your bedroom' 'Do you like crisps'

Then all the posts were like 'red...' 'blue...' 'yes i love crisps'

And that was it. Nobody actually reads each others posts.

[GommeInc]

More a problem with moderation, than the actual forum itself

[Chippiewill]

It has improved a bit, but at one stage it was 'What colour is your bedroom' 'Do you like crisps'

I think any thread where users are more inclined to respond to posts and actually read them is an improvement. Because, who really cares what colour your room is?

[FlyingJesus]

I respect your disagreement . However I think dissolving that forum would cut off people posting, spam has proven not to be a replacement "anything" forum - it's almost got its own culture down there.

If people aren't willing to discuss these pointless topics in spam then all that proves is that they're crap topics.

In the "What's the weather like where you live now?" thread 92/486 replies are the thread starter, and none of it whatsoever is conversation. That's 92 spam posts just from one person. The eating/drinking thread's post leader has a mega 435 posts in the thread, and I obviously haven't read all of it (because it would be very boring) but again I can see no conversation. This is the case for a huge amount of DA threads... However a thread with nearly 40,000 replies, almost entirely conversational covering a huge range of subjects and having over the years forged friendships and supported the rise of some of the forum's best members is seen as spam.

I'm not saying we should suddenly make spam posts count toward our totals or even that the KKK thread alone should be moved to DA (although that'd be nice for my post count ), just making the point that conversational threads that actually occasionally evolve into something occur far far more frequently in spam than DA, where only robotic responses that directly answer a question and lend nothing to discussion are seen for the massive majority.