Rhetorical questions go in Great Debates.
I would like to add my support to cricetus’s suggestion. Sometimes there’s fantastic or enlightening discussion about news or personal circumstances that frankly do not warrant a debate, and is far from mundane (regardless of the arcane meaning of the word).
Or just rename MPSIMS to “General discussion” or something.
Back when I took the time to look at every thread that was posted I did not see the point of more categories.
Since this board has become a lot less fun for me I don’t come here as often. Anything that makes it easier to find the threads I might want to participate in is fine by me. Add a “in the news” section. And politics too.
I know it won’t happen.
It’s not exactly rocket science to find the threads you’ve subscribed to (which are usually the ones you’ve replied to), so remembering what forum you left a comment on should not be an issue if you have taken the time to learn about the system.
By the way, have you noticed that you seem to be the only one being “picked on” about not following the policies and customs of SDMB? You might want to think about why that might be.
If you really want to add or revise forums:
Serious Forums:
General
Science
Politics
Religion
Informal Forums:
Games
Media/Entertainment
Social/Commons
Administrative Forums:
Public Administration
Secret Bat Cave / Hall of Justice (for mod-only communication)
The current set- up is more about function: there are forums for play, for discussion, for combat, and for serious debate.
As currently constructed, MP captures both general topics (mundane) and the less-so (pointless).
Yes, good ideas cerb. But to return to the OP ideas, also one could have a “Breaking News” forum, and the rules would be that it has to be front page news (or front web page news with a link) and that if 24 hours pass with no posts it gets moved to MPS (where it could still be posted to for updates). That would make a lot of sense, and as such it will never be considered.
Can, I have never done that subscribing thing. I am used to seeing a dot or a color change on threads I post in, they won’t do that here for no reason, and it would be a waste of time to suggest it, but that is how we ought to be able to keep track of where posted. I don’t want emails every time someone posts to a thread and bet most people don’t need that either. If you like that, fine but I would rather just see a change in the thread color showing I have posted in it, so much simpler.
Thanks for your input.
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I had written about the subscribe feature, but on preview I see that you believe that you get emails every time someone replies. While that’s possible, it’s not mandatory. You can turn off the emails. If you do that, thread to which you subscribed, and that have new posts in them, will appear when you view your control panel.
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A search reveals that we had several threads about Haiti still going more than ten days after the earthquake. Some showed activity as recently as yesterday or today. Most of the posters here know how to subscribe to threads that interest them (see Canadjun’s post) . So:
a. “Most all” threads didn’t die “quickly,” at least as I understand those terms;
b. Some are still “alive,” and therefore didn’t “die” at all; and
c. It’s more likely that people ran out of things to say in a particular thread than that the posters were all unable to find the place that they had posted before.
But that doesn’t solve the OP’s problem, as restated:
I did, and I still don’t know what you are on about. Tuba listed the kind of OP’s that are appropriate, and where they belong. If you are just going to repost a news item, it doesn’t belong in any forum. There are entire websites devoted to reporting the news without raising questions of fact, debates, opinions or mundane chatter. We do not need to replicate them here.
Well, Fear, if they did, many might use a breaking News forum as their home page and the forum get more views, too. Then people could say. lets discuss Pat Robertson Haiti comments in the pit HERE, and lets discuss if the aid is being done right HERE, and so on, making it like a home page and not a repeat of the news. Lots of folks would view a page like that all the time instead of clicking on CNN every hour.
Gfactor seems to forget it would have to be front page news, I don’t know why he thinks cat pictures and new diets would be there, if someone did post those, move it to MPS as being in wrong forum, of course right away. No different than what you do everywhere else.
I like the current forum setup and don’t feel that adding more categories would make anything better. The heart of the problem seems to be that cricetus doesn’t like the fact that “Mundane and Pointless” are in the forum name.
Well, we’ve had people post about the birth of their children, about divorces and marriages, and about the death of loved ones in MPSIMS. None of those things are mundane or pointless, nor would anyone think they were just because they’re in a forum that says “Mundane and Pointless” on it. It’s just a cute way of saying, “This is our general-purpose chat forum.”
Awhile ago I advocated changing MPSIMS to a different name. I still think that’d be a great idea. cricetus, would twickster’s suggestion of making it something like Miscellaneous Personal Stuff I Must Share meet your needs? I can see how it wouldn’t be ideal, but it might be close enough.
Now that is just too cool.
Thank you for enlightening me! 
My goodness, you’re terribly cynical for someone who has only been [del]relentlessly tortured by vicious evil Nazi-style moderators[/del] visiting here for a month.
We will never compete with Google News or Yahoo or MSN as a news aggregator; why dilute our mission with a weak attempt to duplicate what other websites do far better? I would never pretend that the SDMB is the best place to get breaking news, when it clearly must be broken somewhere else in order to be posted here.
The feature of having a dot (actually, a checkmark) is already there and has been for as long as I’ve been around. It actually indicates that you have subscribed to a thread, but since I have it set to subscribe me to any threads I post in it the checkmark indicates the threads that I have posted in. I have the “e-mail me whenever somebody posts in a subscribed thread” option turned off. That doesn’t stop the checkmark from showing up.
Really, IMHO and MPSIMS should have been merged a long time ago. They cover exactly the same ground, except MPSIMS is a little lighter than IMHO. While you’re at it, dump the mundana and pointless name, and you’ve just created an In the News/General Discussion forum.
I know why this wasn’t done (the mods/admins hate change), but the fact it’s not even up for discussion is idiotic.
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Canadjun**, I salute you. I didn’t know you could do this on here and it’s been bugging me slightly for about four years. Sorted, and thanks. 
I will check this out, thanks much. Shows what a poor job has been done in explaining these options so anyone would know about it.
You were unaware of a feature and it’s everybody else’s fault for not explaining it to you? This is a standard feature on vBulletin. In any case you asked about it and someone answered your question a few hours later. Seems to me the bitching is not required.
Do you think it would be a good idea to make the default “thread subscription” with “no emails”? IME most boards have a visual indicator marking threads posted in.