Ok, so _player1537 and Souvik1997 had some concerns regarding Omnimaga, mostly the randomness section, a few minutes ago. Unfortunately this went in #cemetech, while no Omnimaga member were active, so I went close to miss the "suggestions".

-There's one thing I didn't realize until they brought it up, because I rarely check randomness anymore, it is that people often post actual good topics in Randomness instead of Misc talk. I think Randomness is getting misinterpreted as random discussion. As a result, a lot of good topics ends up there instead of Misc talk. Do you think that section should be renamed to Spam? The only concern, however, is that I fear the content of the section would become worse with the time, with word association threads taking space in the database, and I don't want this because there are actually funny topics there. Should we simply rename the section to "Randomness spam"?

-Another concern that was brought up by these two people was that these topics takes lots of space in the new posts section so it's hard to catch up on relevant stuff. Since EzPortal author ignored my suggestion a while ago about choosing what gets listed in the latest active topics section, would anyone be up to try turning the current latest active topic block into a custom PHP block and maybe add options to allow people to disable groups of threads at the top, such as "hide randomness", "hide help topics", "hide off-topic talk", "hide non-calc dev talk", etc? Otherwise, what would be cool is the ability to choose to ignore certain boards or something, so people could make their new post list less cluttered.

Besides that there was a complain about a post rating but that's the nature of the rating system being based on individual's opinion about a post content. I thought I would bring those up because I was a bit disappointed these concerns were not brought up in front of us.

Sorry about not posting it here.

Maybe you could also change the description of the randomness/misc talk sections to be more specific about what they were intended for.

edit: Damn you, yunhua89!!

It's OK. I just felt it would be best to bring it up . Of course certain things might not be taken in account, depending of if it's feasible or not (or in moderation case, if we want to change policies or not), but the site got rather big so some stuff can end up kinda "abandonned" by busy staff.

Yunhua the issue, tho, is that descriptions won't show up in the new posts list, and some people only use that list instead of the board index.

Personally I'm not blaming people for posting something in randomness or not. Some people probably think something is a bit too spammish to go in Misc talk, while some people might think otherwise. I don't want to clutter the misc talk section either. Maybe a humor/jokes section that still doesn't count towards post counts? That would be a major PITA to sort the randomness content, though...

however, keep in mind some people post there to keep some stuff out of quick reach from guests, like the picture thread.

Whoops...I guess I pressed them out of order.

And yeah, I did ninja you back.

Also, I agree.

I like the idea of hiding certain sections.

I have an idea that might not be easy to make, and might get abused but...
I like the idea of being able to request a person to enter a conversation/thread.
It could be like under the new posts section on the front page that said something like.
Proposed site suggestions by 2 members
Requested by: Happybobjr

I also think it would be cool to have people write a 25-50 character max comment on each post.
It would be like a spoiler button at the side, so it doesn't take up much room, and people could write small comments.
There are many times I want to write just "Cool" or "Awesome Graphics", but I feel as if I would be wasting space.

My personal opinion is that we should just do away with the spam section altogether. I don't think it really adds much to the site.

But it lets us talk about other things, other than calcs. I doubt that anyone here has a one track mind: we have schooling, work, parties, and maybe even significant others. The Misc and Randomness sections let us do that. Also, no new posts are allowed on Randomness if it takes up more than 10% of the total post count.

My personal opinion is that we should just do away with the spam section altogether. I don't think it really adds much to the site.

I think it allows some more freedom to members. Elsewhere some people can't be random at all sometimes because they might get told to not spam, while you can do it in the Randomness section.

As for the request thing, actually OmnomIRC would still notify of new posts in all sections except Randomness. And yeah some people use Randomness for "secrets". Also I don,t think Intro should be hidden from guests. The presence of the intro section makes the board more welcoming to new members in general.