Why are there so few comments on staff reports?
Is it because the staff reports are so excelent in their completeness, that nothing more need be said?
Or is it because no one cares about the staff anymore?
Come one people, let us show some love here, especially so close to the big holiday.
If you set your Show Threads to “the last 30 days”, it’ll look busier in here. 
Seriously, though, my observation is that it depends totally on what’s being served up on the Home Page. Sometimes it IS pretty hot ‘n’ heavy in here, in spite of its current somnolent appearance. The Staff Reports on the more controversial issues, like homeopathy and the various paranormal “things”, naturally tend to generate a lot more responses, especially from what I call the “oh, yeah?” contingent.
I tried the “show all threads” option and that made me feel better. I was worried that they may start getting depressed with the big holiday coming and noone showing them any love and all.
Does this mean that they [the staff] are not working right now? I mean if no one is reading their reports, what are the staff doing?
Staff Reports are sometimes non-controversial, fairly straight-forward, and so don’t often generate discussion. Many Staff Reports are as simple as word or name origins, for instance. Other times, of course, we get pages and pages of information on the Boards about hatters using mercury, or ancient aliens visiting earth, or whatever.
As Moderator of this forum, I’m quite happy that we have few visitors and little in the way of emotional flare-ups.
Also, the Staff Reports have a smaller audience. A person might read one of Cecil’s columns in a number of fine alternative publications across the country, or in one of the books, and feel the need to comment on said column, while the Staff Reports are (for the most part) only availible on the Web. Besides, there’s an inherent human desire to prove the experts wrong, and Cecil is a hell of a lot more prominent as an expert than any of us staffers. We’re just not as tempting as targets.
It’s a form of selection: the staff gets to answer the questions that Cecil doesn’t think is exciting.
Well, sort of RM. I mean, those are definitely some of the questions that are passed over to Staff.
But Cecil may not think they are exciting because they’ve been done before by other, readily-available sources. Or because the answers are too short or too long to make a reasonable column.
Are you suggesting that a question about whether manatees are light or dark meat wouldn’t be exciting to Cecil? Sometimes he passes the most exciting ones to us, just as a perk.
I stand corrected. I should have said “It’s a form of selection: the staff gets to answer the question that Cecil doesn’t think is exciting.”
I bet it’s fair to say the two “Comments…” forums are the ones most-visited by newbies. After all, http://www.straightdope.com is usually the first of these sites discovered by Joe Lunchpail or Jane Bagodoughnuts.
So Cecil’s Columns and the Staff Reports are their way in to the SDMB. That means the Comments forums are the first ones to get any attention, and since Cecil’s more famous, he gets more comments.
Of course, this argument presupposes the assumption that newbies generate the most posts. Maybe that’s not accurate.
This seemed much more logical when it was inside my head. Don’t mind me, folks.