OK… We have forums 1 through 7 (this being forum 2). Then there are forums 12 and 13 (IMHO and Cafe Society).
so where are 8, 9, 10 and 11??? Why can I not see them or post to them? Does Cecil not like me? What were they before if they were removed? Whty were they removed? Are there any byeond 13 that were taken out? I need to know!!
(And as an aside, I would consider it a great honour if Cecil or Ed were to respond… But I don’t know if this is worthy of their response…)
Well, I’m not Cecil or Ed… but my mother says I’m special.
My guess: those numbers are set aside for one of four things:
A) The fora that you and I can’t see, but Moderators & Administrators can. There is, I’m told, a forum where threads are moved (rather than dleted) either for mod reference, or to save on the board resources required for deletion.
B) The numbers are set side for later use as new fora are created.
C) When I signed up, one of those ‘inactive’ fora seemed to be home to some giant, wider-than-one-screen pseudothread where a member or somebody had complied a vB/UBB tutorial or something… I only saw it once when it was referenced in another thread, and I’m not sure it still exists.
D) Something altogether else that I can’t think of.
As for Cecil responding, well, that’s always a tremendously rare and momentous event… if the Perfect Master responded to every thread where he was mentioned, it wouldn’t be long before every thread mentioned him. Anyways, that’s what he has Admins and Mods for. And as for Ed, I dunno. I haven’t seen him post in a while.
[I am not an anything, and my mother wants to know why I went on the witness protection programme] Before the board changed to its current format, there used to be archives of various threads. They were supposed to find a new home in our current format. It didn’t work out. This was unfortunate, but the revenge of TubaDiva is slow and subtle.
This explains at least one of them.
Restricted thread?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=164326
They were forum archives set up in the old UBB system that got disappeared during the conversion to vBulletin, much to our consternation. Some really good stuff went down the shitter.
Well that’s too bad… think of all the ignorance that was lost and then found again when the shitter swallowed those archives…
IMHO and Cafe Society were not created at the time the board was, they were added later on. So you have the visible forums (ATMB, CCC, CSR (formerly "Comments on Cecil’s Mailbag), GQ, GD, MPSIMS, Pit), then a few administrative forums, and then IMHO, and lastly CS, both tacked on at the end.