You must have stopped reading my post right after the quoted part. I immediately demonstrated how the game threads were clogging up the front page, with 22 out of the first 25 threads being game threads. I then posted an anecdote about golf, which was followed up by a golf thread in TGR being revived by the OP because nobody had responded in several days. I hadn’t seen the OP at all before, due in part to it disappearing from my screen view in short order.
But Chronos raises a very valid point: If we go by activity and number of posts, the games belong in the forum and the threads about games don’t. If anything, the latter should all be moved back to Café Society, where they can be pushed off the front page by all the Dr. Who and Game of Thrones threads.
The only objective way to measure the “worth” of a thread is by how many people post to it.
As for threads disappearing before you can see them - you do know you can adjust the size of your pages, right? Mine is currently set for “the last month” for the Game Room.
We don’t need an objective way to measure the worth of a thread. I don’t think your suggestion works anyway, but nobody is saying the threadgames are worthless. It’s just that the prime real-estate–the top threads in a forum–are strongly taken up by the threadgames in a way that makes it more difficult to find game threads.
Think of it as natural selection in action. 
Something you might consider – you can change the default view in every forum in terms of number of posts displayed.
UserCP/Edit Options/Thread Display Options
I think you can also change the default in each forum area in terms of time – see the bottom of the front page for each forum. The default in most forums is two days, but you can make it whatever you like. You can also change this globally from the UserCP, you don’t have to use the default.
Wait a minute. Should Game of Thrones threads go in the Game Room Forurm?
That doesn’t make the Thread Games versus Discussion Threads ratio in the Game Room any easier to read.
Why do some of you arguing against this idea keep ignoring the repeated point us nonthreadgamers keep making? The reason the number of threads about video games and sports has dropped off is because many of us avoid that forum altogether because it’s such a headache seeing through the thread games. It’s not fun to put together a well thought out post then immediately see it pushed 5-6 posts down from the top because there’s a bunch of Speak to me only in… Threads cockblocking us?
Why are you guys so against something that effects you exactly zero? Like you’re only being contrarian because you can be?
No we’re not.
OK, the mods are discussing this behind the scenes. We understand the problem, and there are several potential solutions.
One thing I note is that several of the games are really Cafe Society fodder (“Speak to me only in Movie Quotes” and the like), and perhaps one step is to move such games there.
Much appreciated!
Sounds like a good idea, as we currently have a Star Trek, Star Wars, an Airplane! quote thread and a Looney Tunes quote thread masquerading as a rabbit recipe thread residing there now.
Thanks.
I can only speak for myself (duh), but I never visit The Game Room forum. I don’t visit it precisely because of this exact issue – I’m not interested in game threads and there’s too.damn.many of them. It’s hard (not VERY, since I’m talking about reading a message board instead of, say, ditch digging :D) to pick through all the titles to find non-game threads. And the game threads quickly push other threads off the first page, which stunts or outright kills attempts to get a discussion going.
If game threads had a sub-forum*, I would actually go to The Game Room. As it stands now, though, the game threads keep me away.
- and seriously, it’s just adding a sub-forum! It’s not as momentous as a new Pope being chosen or as difficult as negotiating a treaty.
Characterizing your opponents as having dishonest motivations is not the best way of winning an argument. If anything, Chronos is trying to help by pointing out that you haven’t actually proven your case that moving the game threads out would actually fix the problem.
I almost never participate in thread games. But I’ve also not found the Game Room to be a problem. So the fact that some of you avoid the forum because you find it too hard is not a compelling argument for me.
What would be helpful would be to show that, before the game threads became so popular, there were more of the other threads.
And, yes, I know they are discussing a solution. They did last time, too. I still think you should be trying to make the most compelling possible case.
They are already proposing solutions that would just move the problem to another forum.
But this is not the case, as I explained earlier in the thread. The way threads with discussion work is that those that are most interesting, topical, or otherwise engaging tend to get the most posts and remain at the top due to the merit of that interestingness.
Game threads remain at the top due to the nature of the top due to their low effort, low information, high posting frequency nature. They aren’t the same sort of thing.
You’re essentially saying that a thread entitled “Let’s count!” where people just make posts entailing “1” “2” “3” etc, which will stay at the very top of its page due to people posting dozens of posts a day with just a number in them, and hence crowding out a much more interesting, nuanced discussion where people take time to make substantial, long posts infrequently is “natural selection” in action, as if the counting thread was more worthy of crowding out the forum.
This isn’t a comparison of, say, an NFL thread being more popular than a baseball thread, because those are the same type of content, with different interest level. Thread games, by their nature, abuse the back to top forum of features in a way that makes them less meaningful and wasn’t intended.
Addressing three other points.
- What’s the harm in creating a sub-forum for thread games? When splitting topical discussion forums, the risk that if there’s not enough content to sustain them, and they’ll whither and die. And that you don’t need to split two topics up if they’re naturally somewhat linked because they’ll have cross-pollination of interests. This, for instance, is why you’d probably reject a proposal to split Great Debates up into three forums focusing on discussion religion, philosophy, and politics.
But thread games do not cross-pollinate with anything else except perhaps each other. In which case a forum for thread games might actually benefit the thread game community, since if they’re in the mood for a thread game, they can go to one place and see them all. They are an entirely different sort of content, and there is little to no upside to allowing them to co-exist with discussion content.
So then, what’s the problem? People are complaining about not wanting to see yet another forum on their forum list, but let’s be realistic here. You look at the entirety of your forum list infrequently, and you’d suffer just one extra forum name, and it may even be in smaller text if it was a sub-forum. That forum name would always be in the same place, always be easy to avoid, and you could even use the subscribed forums feature on your user CP to ignore it.
That is trivially easy compared to those who use the game room having thread games clutter up their interface. There are far more - usually the majority of threads in their forum rather than one out of a dozen. They have different names, with different ones emerging all the time, which means you either have to guess from the title that it’s a thread game, or open it up to investigate. They change position constantly, and there’s no systematic way to ignore them.
So “I don’t want one more subforum cluttering up my forum list” is simply petty compared to “I don’t want 20+ variably named, always moving threads cluttering up my thread list”
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If the concern that the game room doesn’t have enough content to exist on its own, with just sports/game/etc talk, well, then it doesn’t have enough content to exist currently anyway. The thread games are not adding to its content, they’re cluttering it up. Sure, they add to some arbitrary “post counts in the game room per day” number, but that doesn’t indicate health, it just indicated clutter. Yes, the game room would be one of the lesser active forums, but at least it would be readable. It would likely increase the actual discussion content of the forum as people would be more willing to participate in it without all the clutter. It’s unlikely that discussion traffic to the game room would decline, because there’s simply no reason to think ABCD cross-pollinates any traffic with video game or sports threads.
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Discussion of off-board games should not be lumped in with game threads. Fantasy football, for instance. Those threads do not have a frequent post, low content format like thread games do. They’re actual discussion, not the playing of the game. They’re more akin to discussing a series of events, like the world series or a week in the NFL, because you’re generating actual discussion about the results of some game and sports related event.
Now the difference is that they’re more exclusionary, since only so many people are involved in the leagues, as compared to an open thread about a popular event, but they still share much more in common with actual discussions than they do with thread games. And as such, they belong in the game room, not with thread games.
Yes, indeed! Some of us had no idea that our game posts were preventing the increase of mankind’s intelligence.
Should the game threads be moved or not, I predict that we’ll be able to find them. Many thread game posters are resourceful, and have the ability to navigate their way through forums.
Idle Thoughts, Please consider changing the A game’s name to be: A-B-Cockblock & Clutter, so as to daily remind us of the mission of that game. 
As someone who doesn’t read the game forum at all in large part because of the thread games and who loves Cafe Society, please allow me to say “Please don’t!”. All you’d be doing is moving the problem that Thread Games, by their very nature, tend to stay at the top of the forum and push everything else to later pages, to another forum.
Plus, if you’re going to move Thread Games about (say) movies to CS, will you be moving threads about (say) US Presidents (“Name the Presidents middle names in chronological order”) to Elections or GD? Thread Games with factual answers to GQ (“Periodic Table of Elements–Rhyming Style”)?
Obviously the thread games bring in traffic, and that’s always desirable…so why not a “Thread Games” forum? It’ll attract more of the Thread Games fans, and not mess up other forums.
Game threads are mundane and pointless, and unfortunately, people feel the need to share them. Ok, if not mpsims, than a sub forum called the Post Toilet.
Threads about sports and video games spur discussion. That deserves a forum. The post parties deserve isolation.