I don't want to miss it because there are 300 posts abou cats and jobs and cooking in-between.

I'm not sure how adding extra threads will help. Natter's been insane pretty much from the beginning. Every new thread we've added hasn't decreased the amount of Natter.

We can't FORCE people to Natter, of course, but the potential balkanization makes me sad. It makes us less community-like. There are people in Spoilers and Smallville who I have NEVER seen before.

And the community part of us is the best part, IMO. I wouldn't travel across the country to meet so damn many of you if you were all just some people who happen to watch the same show I do.

The community built from the being together in the same thread(s), and the more threads we have, the more splitty we are, and the less community we have.

My .02, FWIW.

I'm not sure how adding extra threads will help.

Um, I don't especially want extra threads. Truth be told, I couldn't keep up with more here than I keep up with anyhow. I just don't see how having more threads would wreck the community. Is it not a community on forums where anyone can add a thread who feels like it? That is not my experience at all.

it won't help. and catching up on 20 posts in 15 different threads where there is supposed to be a topic isn't gonna allow for much of talking about how someone is doing.

FWIW, the Due South thread is about 300 posts ahead of Smallville, but then the former is the unofficial 'fandoms that don't fit in other categories' thread.

Besides, Fraser and RayK? Hot.

I have a question: does anyone participate in another forum where there's so much resistance to new threads? Because everywhere else that I post or have posted, it's pretty much start one if you want one.

The first board on which I posted (Time Online's Faith board), anyone could start a thread. The moderator would delete offensive ones, of course; and on one board (Time 100) he started deleting duplicates after a rash of Elvis threads. I think he did the same thing occasionally on the Politics board, but that was pretty uncontrollable. But if any thread had no new posts for a given period (two weeks on Faith, and--

Er. Sorry. Got distracted there for a moment. Anyway, on Politics, threads would be killed after a week of inactivity.

There were some obvious differences, of course, compared to this place. Its moderation had to be paid for, so there was less of it. There wasn't such a community feel to it, and any communities (we did form a subculture known as Cromists) had no actual say over how the thing was run. And, of course, it was Time Magazine ponying up the cost of the site.

catching up on 20 posts in 15 different threads where there is supposed to be a topic isn't gonna allow for much of talking about how someone is doing.

This is why you keep a central bar or natter or chit-chat thread. It works on every other freaking forum in the world, is all I'm saying.

A lot of times I'll have two windows open, one skimming through Natter, and one to read through the threads with fewer posts.

I keep up with Natter, but I do skim a fair amount. (Given that there are roughly twelve thousand conversations going on at once in there, the chances that I'm going to be interested in all of them is pretty slim, you know?)

I'm much more in favor of "ghettoizing" certain topics (Porn, fanfic, Tolkien) than of branching off into lots of smaller general-interest threads. I never really saw the point of Literary, to be honest -- don't we all read? So why did it need its own thread? Likewise Music and Movies -- are these really such niche interests that we can't talk about them in the common room? But when there's a significant number of people that want to talk about something that's likely to be of zero interest to everyone else, I think it's more polite to create an LotR thread than to take over Natter for weeks on end.

Well Smallville has been on winter hiatus. The new episodes start next Tuesday. So I expect it to pick up.

But yeah, Fraser and RayK, very hot. Hotter than Clark and Lex.