Ralp posted:

It's that way for lots of the forums. Like, there's been a Game of Thrones discussion thread in GBS and TV/IV and Book Barn and GiP and FYAD and probably YOSPOS and BYOB and PYF.

Actually let me reframe it in terms of a forum instead: I'm going to pick on YOSPOS for example because the mods there have done a good job in improving this. When the funny computer forum has megathreads for Game of Thrones, working out, favorite music, Diablo 3, bitcoin, politics, general chat, and loving cat picture spam, well then it's not a focused subforum anymore, it's a general forum that happens to have a few more computer threads than other general forums. Why do we even have subforums if that's what they're going to be?

This isn't necessarily bad (from a user's perspective it's fine), but it makes things a lot harder to organize, administrate, and moderate. Each subforum acts like an offsite that happens to be hosted onsite, and I don't want to administrate a dozen slightly different general forums, I want to administrate one forum: Something Awful. When you pay $10 for an account, it shouldn't be admission to one forum of your choice where you camp out forever and never leave (unless you really are only interested in posting about that specific topic, that's fine too). Instead, your account grants you access to all of the SA Forums. Use them!

And of course there's some overlap; I'm not demanding that every topic be strictly categorized and indexed. Rather, I'm asking, on a case by case basis (and this thread happens to be such a case): "Does it make sense for this topic to be duplicated in another forum, in this case GBS? Or does it belong in the dedicated subforum, in this case YLLS?" There's no hard and fast criterion for making that decision, but that's what I'm asking about. Hope that helps explain where I'm coming from.