- There should be a moratorium on new forums and categories, especially for ones that would weaken Off Topic. Off Topic is meant as catchall for all the non-tech forum topics to begin with, you don't need fifty new forums to limit forum activity.
Perhaps a sport specific forum? I mean, this is a tech site (and why I joined many years ago) but we now have a love & relationship forum, a garage (car) forum, fitness...seems like sports wouldn't be too far fetched to include.
I wonder if there's a way to do both...
One of the nice things about ATOT is you never know what you'll find there. Except that it won't be pron and it won't be nasty politics. I like that. But now you won't find health & fitness discussion. Or car discussion. Or home & garden discussion...
What I'm wondering is if it's possible to make a "forum" in vBulletin, which you can't post to, but which shows the posts from all sub-forums? For example,
look here. That forum has lots of subforums. You can't post to that forum, but you can post to any sub-forum, and the post will appear in the main forum. Edit: But, of course, that's not a vBulletin site.
If that's possible, I'd like Off Topic to be a main forum, that you can't post directly to, and have Health & Fitness, The Garage, Home & Garden, and almost everything else (edit: everything else social, that is) be sub-forums that you can post to. Obviously there should also be a catch-all for anything else - it's just that if the parent is "Off Topic" I don't know what to call the catch-all forum.
As for what not to put in this "Off Topic parent" forum, I would exclude Politics & News - they have different moderation requirements and can be nastier. Maybe Discussion Club as well, but I'm not sure. I would also exclude Love & Relationships. As users who aren't logged in can't see posts in L&R, they shouldn't see the posts listed or blank spaces for them in "Off Topic parent".