You 1999ers are such know-it-alls! 
Regarding your snapshot of the BBQ page (nice sleuthing, btw), it looks like most, or a good deal, of the threads are general rants.
The BBQ Pit has always been about having a place to say things that would get you banned on the other forums. In other words, it’s the place to engage in insults. Those might be insults of posters, or they might be insults of people in the world in general (rants). It never was just about insulting other posters.
As for the proposal in the OP, I just see it as creating another forum for a MB that at one point had a limited number of fora as an express policy of TPTB. I see no point to doing what is proposed.
Except insulting people in the world wouldn’t get you banned on other forums except GQ.
It’s explicitly not increasing the number of forums, so I’m not sure this is a valid objection. (edit: I know I said “create a new forum,” as one option, but I would strongly favor replacing Elections instead of leaving it and creating another).
Do you think it was unnecessary or useless to create the Elections forum in the first place? If not, how is it not going to be necessary or useful to do it again when the next US election comes around and the Current Events forum gets swamped with election threads the same way GD did in the past? Won’t people be upset that their thread about the little girl who fell into a well got bumped off the page by the 60 threads about how Trump can’t possibly win again, or if there is a way to impeach him if he does run, or if the EC should not vote for him, or if Congress will declare him unfit, or if the IRS could arrest him for tax evasion or if…
I think having election stuff go in current events would be fine. Sure, it’ll swamp the forum for awhile, just like it swamps all news media for awhile; that’s what trends in news do.
Did you think it was necessary to create an Elections forum in the first place?
I agree with this if it means the “Current Events” forum wouldn’t have the same prissy rules as MPSIMS. Also, mixing current events with elections might push down some of the crappier threads come election year.
It’s high time that threads like “10 Killed in Terrorist Bombing” aren’t in a forum called Mundane and Pointless.
I’d be in favor of Elections being broadened to Politics and World Affairs.
Yep, otherwise, when there is no actual election in the offing, there would, strictly speaking, be nothing on-topic to discuss.
We’ve had quite a few threads about the 2020 presidential election in the US, not to mention the 2018 midterms.
I’m really confused, given OP’s stated goals, why he supports “Current Events” but doesn’t support “Politics.” Current events are actually discussed all over the message board, everywhere from MPSIMS, Pit, GD, GQ (to a degree) and the Election forum.
If you rename it Current Events there’s a strong argument for moving a large portion of all active GD threads to the new “Current Events” forum, not to mention moving a big chunk of MPSIMS currently active threads to said forum.
Basically, forums like Great Debates have always included, intrinsically debates about current events. If you make a “Current Events” forum you’re just going to make a really noisy forum that’s hard to follow.
I think the spirit of the original elections forum was to mitigate how U.S. political discussions basically came to create way too much noise on most of the other forums during election season, so to me a general “Politics” forum makes sense. A “Current Events” forum makes little sense, because it paupers other forums of stuff we’ve always talked about on those forums (long before Elections ever existed), and it shuffles them into what will be a very noisy and poorly curated forum.
Your second sentence answers your first sentence :). Yes, I would expect a “current events” forum to be pretty active; it’d take threads that currently exist all over the place and put them in one place. You want to read up about what people are saying about Trump’s transgender order, you wouldn’t need to go to Great Debates and MPSIMS and The Pit, and then remember which forum you were in for each thread and change your posting habits accordingly. You’d go to the new forum, where the discussion would have one set of rules (presumably similar to the rules in Elections, i.e., vigorous debate allowed, personal insults not).
Again, although it’d take threads from other forums, I think it’d reduce duplicate threads, so it wouldn’t be as cluttered as it might be. Other forums would still stay vigorous. GD would be most affected, and looking at the first twenty threads or so there as of my typing, about a third would go into Current Events (stuff like “Why are police so quick to kill?” or “The 2nd amendment was written to calm fears about ending slavery” or “Do humans have free will?” would stay right where they are.)
One possibility would be a format requirement: every OP in Current Events should contain a link to a news story, and a discussion of that news story. If you’re thinking of an OP containing these two traits, it should probably go in Current Events. I believe this sort of bright line would help reduce thread moves and the consequent disruption to conversations that happens thereby.
ISTM that a poster saying “It’s difficult to discuss this within the parameters of MPSIMS.” is not a problem that needs solving and a pretty lame reason to create a new forum. I think it’s fine if a big story spawns a few threads and posters can find the forum suitable to their ability to refrain from insulting others.
If the objection is that momentous current events don’t belong in a forum named “Mundane & Pointless”, perhaps the issue is simply the name of MPSIMS?
After all, l many folks start threads like “Well, this is neither mundane nor pointless to me, but …” Followed by some bombshell like “I have gizzard cancer …” or “my Dad died” or …
How about we change MPSIMS’ *name * and nothing else. Make it something else like “Miscellaneous Stuff (that doesn’t fit elsewhere discussed politely)”.
After all, the name MPSIMS was pretty much chosen back at the apogee of Cecil’s snarkitude for purely marketing reasons. Not for being a bland but factual label like you’d find on a bottle of prescription meds.
IIRC, the MPSIMS name was taken from the title of a long running thread used on the old AOL site. They wanted it to be mostly GQ type stuff and so that thread was allowed to vent all the personal jibber jabber. I have in the past said that you could simply change the forum title to “Stuff I Must Share”. Easy peasy.
I for one think it’s worthwhile to separate topics on:
(1) elections, politics, policy issues, and international relations
From (2) other things that just happened recently.
That’s why I don’t favor changing Elections to Current Events
OP’s response notwithstanding, this is a bad idea and I hope it’s not implemented. I would say based on the official description of “Elections”, that forum is simply misnamed:
By the very description of the forum, it’s not just a forum about “Elections”, it’s a forum about Politics. I think just changing its name to Politics would lead to more people putting all the “political news” stories that aren’t election related (i.e. most political news right now) into Politics where arguably, as per the forum description, they should have been anyway.
Or “Elections and Politicking”.
YDRC. additional characters to not trigger the auto-lowercase thing.
I tried reporting several threads that are in no way about Elections. I was quoted the forum description. Just as Martin Hyde said, “For discussion of elections and electoral politics, including strategy and tactics, political parties, individual races, political news, and politicians and public figures.” screams Politics down the line.
Elections is a bad name. People are now totally confused about what threads belong there. We keep having this discussion time after time because the current name doesn’t correspond to reality.
Please. Change it. “Elections” is not working.