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to keep these forums a viable resource i understand that we must keep the 'chatter' to a minimum when answering or helping others, so how about an 'off topic' section where we can talk about anything? i can see though that this would entail more work for Neo to set it up, so maybe this is a bad idea. but if we have a separate forum just for general conversation, with a mod or two to lockdown flames and the usual stuff... any way, just an idea. any thoughts?

My concern about creating one or more off-topic forums are:

(1) The need to spend time reading and moderating them,

(2) The effects on database search performance (unless we mass prune them from time-to-time, which is possible with vB),

(3) The possibility that good technical discussions will happen in off-topic areas and then we will lose them if we mass prune the off-topic threads out of the data-base from time-to-time.

Many popular forums have off-topic areas and after a while (at least in some forums) the off-topic posts become the largest forums.

BTW: I've been very happy with the quality of the Q&A and the technical expertise of the moderators, who are going great! We are really lucky to have such a great team of nice people who enjoy helping others.

Do you think an off-topic area will be benefical to the growing community?

I was thinking about expanding the 'Special Interest Topics' Area based on special interests of the users.... expanding in a technical direction with tutorials, etc.....

How does that sound?

yeah i thought of that also, the extra time to moderate is a big consideration, aswell as the number of posts that will acumulate. maybe the mod(s) of the forum could move valuable tech. discussion to an appropriate section; however that is a considerable amount of extra work. i think that it is very possible that an off topic forum will be beneficial, however there will bethe possibility of disagreements and flames, aswell as just purley use-less posts == more work for the mods.

expanding the special interests forum would be a great idea, it will become a valuable section of the site i think.

and afterall in the end it is up to you neo, i really have no criticism of these boards, you really do an amazing job of keeping these boards a great and extremely valuable resource.

Thanks. I hope what makes these boards special is the commercial free, consistent quality of the technical Q&A and the courtesy and respect that people show each other every day.

Having said that, the boards and features could be MUCH better and suggestions are welcome. Ideas for senior members willing to host and admin related uncommerical on-line services for UNIX.COM subdomains are also encouraged.

Also, vB has lots of features like private messages and calendar that I have disabled. Someone with the time to keep up with related events and admin the UNIX.COM calendar (so it is a real interesting calendar with lots of cool events) would be useful, for example.