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.

I guess this conversation just bothers me because I have posted in the following forums:

Prodigy
Usenet
Table Talk
The Rant
The Perfect World
Ultimate Wedding
Livejournal
WorldCrossing

They all let whoever wanted to start a thread, with the exception of spam or duplicates (and, in the case of UW, censorship of anyone who wasn't sugar-sweet, but that's beside the point). And they all had a community at least as strong as the Buffistas.

Edit: Burrell, you're defining community differently than I am, I guess. I can understand that. I've equally felt like a part of something in all of those places. IME, it's about how much I post, not how many threads there are.

I was just going to quote part of fayJay's post, but I realize I could quote the whole thing. So What FayJay said.

What Burrell Said.

TT never felt like a community to me.

TOL became a community for me, but that was after a core group of halfway reasonable people, of all sorts of religious beliefs (including one Satanist) had found some common cause in beating back frequent drive-bys by fundies (for want of a better term) of various stripes. The siege mentality can work wonders.

TT was problematic, largely because the other places I posted were just too damn quiet.

fwiw, NewsUnlimited (and BooksUnlimited, FilmUnlimited et al) allows any registered poster to start a new thread.

But there's much more of a sense of community at Buffistas.org than there is over there.

(At least on the busier boards. BU and FU were fairly Buffista-like, actually, only with different agendas.)