Much of MPSIMS is mundane and pointless.
But much of it is not.
Right now, the breaking news thread on the Ukraine war thread is running there. On Sept 11, the was also a long thread.
There are threads about the death or illness of fellow Dopers, etc.
That’s all pretty serious stuff…and the forum title should reflect it.
A while back, the mods re-named General Q to Factual Questions…A very simple change, and a good one.
I suggest we do the same with MPSIMS.
Absent evidence that people aren’t using it correctly, I don’t really see why it is sensible. It has its name for historical reasons, and that’s fine.
What I would recommend is getting rid of the long name on the main page. No one thinks of it as “Mundane and Pointless Stuff I Must Share.” It’s just MPSIMS. So call it that, and don’t worry about explaining what it means. Or, as I’ve suggested before, come up with something else MPSIMS can stand for.
That way you keep a nod to the history, while dealing with this thing that seems to bother people so much.
I like this idea, I think labeling the threads in that forum as “mundane” and “pointless” inherently diminishes their value.
I think we should also have a “what if” forum for questions that don’t have factual answers (what if so-and-so historical event played out the opposite way type of questions) but aren’t exactly Great Debates. That forum might need rules around not outright rejecting the hypothetical although I certainly think there can be some good discussion out of why something couldn’t have happened the opposite way.
We have to be careful splitting forums and creating new forums. If there aren’t enough posts in the new forums to keep folks interested then everyone stops going to those forums and they die.
IMHO already works pretty well for “what if” questions and for debate-ish type topics that aren’t debatable enough for GD.
But we should create a new forum for posts about current events. We have forums (fora?) for specific topics like elections or pandemics. We should also have one for general current events.
My suggestion for this forum’s title would be “News on the March”.
I think it would be worthwhile to name it something like
“News and other Items of Note”
Because the majority of posts in the thread are something along those lines. Breaking news, and then the various little tidbits or pieces of information that a poster has come across and wanted to share.
Put the news first, so people know where it goes, and acknowledge that the other items are also important but not categorized the way the other forums tend to be.
I’m okay having real news and personal news and personal ramblings in the same forum. But I’m in the group that doesn’t care for the name. It took me months after i joined this chat site to check out the forum because it sounded, well, pointless. And i don’t understand the attachment to an acronym whose letters i struggle to remember.
But i think a lot of users do feel fondness for that acronym, for whatever reason.