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.

I don't think (I may be wrong, though) that anyone's proposing new threads from an idea that they will decrease the volume of discourse in Natter, or from a sense of not wanting to hang out with the folks in Natter.

Had there been a general feeling of a Movie thread being a good thing, I'd have been pleased, because it's a thread in which I wouldn't anticipate there being as high a level of posting as Natter, and thus it's one I'd stand more of a chance of actually following and participating in on more than a surface level.

But this isn't a big deal to me, and I don't mean to imply that it is - I'm just trying to clarify the appeal of specific topic thread as I see it.

Is it not a community on forums where anyone can add a thread who feels like it? That is not my experience at all.

TT never felt like a community to me. It was too big. As for WX, only one or two *threads* feel community-like to me. Otherwise, it's just a forum. I *do* think Buffistas is different, at least now. If we just become an open forum, we will inevitably lose some of that sense of community.