elmwood is correct. TubaDiva, C K Dexter Haven or LynnBodoni could give a better answer, but on the old AOL boards that preceded straightdope.com (and which I never visited), there was pretty much two types of discussion, from what I hear:
General Questions
Everything Else
When The Straight Dope left AOl and straightdope.com was originally set up using vBulletin forum software, the forums were:
About This Message Board, aka ATMB
Comments on Cecil’s Columns / Comments on Staff Reports
General Questions, aka GQ
Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share, aka MPSIMS (the forum title comes from the name of a discussion thread at the AOL board)
Then The BBQ Pit made an appearance to confine the fights to one forum
After that Great Debates, aka GD due to popular demand
then In My Humble Opinion (aka IMHO), again due to popular demand (the half-way point between GQ and GD)
The first “subject-based” forum was Cafe Society, which was a departure to the way the forums were divided before. Now any type of discussion (be it GQ, GD or IMHO) about the arts was supposed to be in that forum.
After that came The Game Room for all those WoW / Mafia / Sports lovers.
The board owner added Straight Dope Chicago for his new column about Chicago.
2010 U.S. Election was created as an experiment to placate people tired of seeing political discussions in GD, and finally Marketplace was added, again due to popular demand.