we’ll put the nitpickers in the furnace, hey something recycable has gotta keep this place going 
I always imagine it to be a big, old-fashioned carnival:
ATMB is the entrance where the barker entices you in.
Comments on Cecil’s Columns and Staff Reports are the game booths where you try in vain to win stuffed animals.
General Questions is the roller coaster ride through the mountains of ignorance.
Great Debates is in the big top, where you can argue with anybody and everybody.
Cafe Society is the freak show.
IMHO is where you can buy all sorts of foodstuffs that are bad for you, such as cotton candy and funnel cakes.
MPSIMS is the house of mirrors where you can look at yourself or others and laugh.
The BBQ Pit is a culmination of all the scary clowns you’ve ever seen (or not seen).
It’s sorta like the Hall Of Justice with 20,000 clones each of Wendy and Marvin. 
I’m not sure what it looks like but it sure doesn’t move very fast…
Turtle?
Guess I should have read the OP a little closer…DOH!
Heh, I suppose we could tweak the topic to include something like “If the SDMB were a person, animal, or object, what would it be?”
With all the complaints about the slow servers lately I can’t help but think of a hamster.
wherever it’s gonna be you’ll be sending messages via hamsters with a pouch on their backs where you can place your posts. then you see your hamster scurry off into the distance, sit back, and hope it reaches it’s destination safely…
Can we whip the hamsters?
I imagine it a bit like a supermarket with the different forums indicated by overhead signs.
At the entrance are the MODS, arms folded, black suits, shades the usual grim looking scene.
In the car park there are loads of banned members shuffling around manacles on wrists and ankles collecting shopping trolleys that are full of questions and delivering them to a small side door marked “HRH Cecil”.
Occasionally this door opens and a disembodied arm reaches out grabs a trolley and drags it inside muttering “Another load your highness” followed by a whimper and the sound of a whiplash.
I may be wrong of course
A large lump of jello with lots of little green organisms spinning around in it, hitting each other. Sometimes they get eaten.
My imagining of the SDMB is as a members-only “key” club, that is quite willing to throw out those who violate the rules.
The “General Questions-as-library” image is one I agree with.
I’d put the BBQ Pit and Cafe Society in the same place. This would be a bar, where various people are arguing with each other.
Great Debates and In My Humble Opinion would both be like “Speaker’s Corner” in London.
MPSIMS would probably be a lounge.
The Comments on Staff Reports, Comments on Cecil’s Columns, and the About This Message Board would all be in the form of complaint boxes, where you place your comments.
The moderators would be the bouncers and other staff.
Oh, of course why hadn’t I though of that? But…
-
Would that by any chance mean I, as a worker at Ministry of Truth, get to edit old posts, in accordance with the principles of Fighting Ignorance?
-
Are banned posters really getting vaporized?
-
Is Cecil’s alter ego O’Brien or is it Goldstein?
-
Is the pit actually room 101?
- Rune