Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24077689-20131206203240/@comment-5643552-20131207073637

There were several other boards before somebody decided to make the forum pretty much only site matters. The forums are (were?) difficult to moderate effectively due to the fact that it's all in AJAX. The old forum was easier to manage, but less user-friendly; it was far less susceptible to spam, but hardly anyone used it at all, so it didn't really matter.

The issue with talking about specific pastas is old and not really relevant now that we have article comments. Back when we still used article talk pages for pasta discussion, users (new users in particular) would constantly abuse the forum system, basically creating threads to comment on pastas and nothing else. I mean, it still happens on occasion, but the comments section is not hard to find.

You could still argue that all pasta discussion should be relegated to the comments section of whatever pasta it is, I guess, but forum discussion is just not the same as comments. Forums are more open to actual discussion than comment threads, and people would be more likely to join in a forum discussion than one on a comment thread. Even if there is some spam here and there, it's nothing to get so worked up over. And it's sort of unavoidable. I mean, it's a forum. At least it's not nearly as bad as chat, and most of the really bad spam died down around September, when school was back in seesion.

...Anyway, to answer your question: Creating new boards is as easy for admins as creating pages is to regular users. Creating, deleting, merging and editing boards are all easy shit. I think we should have more than a site questions and a general site discussion board; the only other place to discuss things is chat (which is an awful substitute since it is almost always devoid of any actual discussion), and the comments sections of pastas. Not much room for community discussion.

TL;DR: Our forum policies are outdated and too focused on "site matters only". Not that the site doesn't matter, but it should be the sole topic.