How about a Sarah Palin forum?
I know it sounds silly and over-specialized, but for some inexplicable reason, Sarah Palin seems to be the single most prolific subject of threads on the SDMB right now, and the threads are scattered throughout a number of forums. It’s really starting to get out of hand.
I jokingly suggested an Obama forum a while back. I know it looks overwhelming, but it’ll pass.
I think it’s a bit sad that we, and other countries, don’t have a greater presence here. Damn you Yankees and your world dominance.
All this proves is we have the most Dopers
A Computer/IT forum sounds to me like a good move.
An images forum does seem to be technically possible; as someone noticed the other day that image tags were turned on in the Barn House forum. They were later turned off.
I want a forum for suggesting new forums. 
I don’t know if this is possible with our (or any) version of the software, but what about “tags” for each thread, which would be entered or selected by the OP or by a moderator. This would eliminate the need for subforums and remove the Main Page clutter, while still filtering out all of the junk. To wit:
A Great Debate thread about Sarah Palin, which is tagged with tags such as “election 2008” and “palin”.
A Game Room thread about baseball that is tagged with “sports” and “baseball”.
A BBQ Pit thread tagged with “RO” and “user-directed”.
Tags would probably need to be limited to very hot topics (like “palin”), or topics which are broad enough to allow for filtering (such as “baseball”). It would be very time consuming and inefficient to allow mods or users to add tags for each minute detail, such as “17th century politicians”; those obscure topics could be found through the search feature anyway.
And so, at the top of each forum page, or perhaps in the User CP, an organized list of current tags would be listed, for which the user could filter out their preferred results, in addition to a “Display All” option.
…and it looks like something similar may be an option after all:
Perhaps not much at the moment, however, I think it’s a bit chicken-and-egg. I used to enjoy discussing and debating interesting, non-political topics in GD. nowadays, I just don’t often venture in there because it’s Palin, Palin, Palin, McCain, Obama. Palin.
I’m not saying my individual presence or absence makes more than a jot of difference, but perhaps I’m representative of a whole bunch of people put off GD because of too much politics - with less participation in those other topics, the threads that arise drop out of sight quite quickly.
I think it’s great for people who want to be able to discuss and debate politics to be able to do so freely - and I think it’s a big enough fish to warrant its own pond.
A GD forum with politics taken out would be a bit quiet, for sure, but so is a library.
If necessary, I’d be quite happy if it was created as a child forum of the existing GD and titled ‘not politics’
I mentioned in another thread the creation of a Current Events forum. Most of the political threads in GD don’t feature much discussion (ex: the convention play-by-play threads) and some political threads in the Pit that don’t get too heated could also go here, maybe even some sports threads that have more to do with the drama than the games also would be at home in the new forum.
Seconded. Or whatever.
I wouldn’t mind a U.S. elections sub forum so that all this stuff can go in one place. However, what happens to those threads after the event passes and the side conversation forum goes away?
How hard would be be just to categorise a few child forums for GD though - Politics, Religion, Ethics, Philosophy, Science, Everything Else.
I’m not sure, but I think vBulletin can be set up so that anyone who wanted to could still see them all in one big heap.
That would be the best solution, but can vBulletin do that? I have never seen a message board work that way, but I am no expert.
I’ve seen a message board that I think works that way - in fact, I think it even enabled the option of a thread appearing in mutiple subforums simultaneously (so, for example, a creationism vs evolution debate could simultaneously appear in Religion and Science).
Not really sure if vB does anything like that though.