Who the heck even checks out the Wierd Earl link? Or any of the others from Threadspotting on down? I come across a multitude of apparently Wierd Earl-worth links during my daily surfing, maybe it has become an anachronism? Certainly not worthy of its own forum, cripes.
I don’t have a strong feeling one way or another. But, if you forced me to vote (ow, leggo my arm!), I’d say, “no” to the new forum.
If you added a line to the description of ATMB like, “Here’s the place for threads on Weird Earl’s and Threadspoting,” it might draw more people into ATMB. Just in case you thought it was getting lonely in here… 
There’s nothing to stop you from making it a weekly or monthly tradition to start a thread with “runners-up” for Weird Earl. (I think it’d be pretty cool, too.) And the concept of a “Spotting Threadspotting Thread” just makes my head hurt.
teemings apparently hasn’t been updated since 2003! Come on!
GoB from Arrested Development throwaway.
teemings is/was written by the members of the Straight Dope community with the tireless work of Eutychus and others for editorial support.
If you want new material there will need to be work done on it by someone, but lordhavemercy, the staff has a plateful here, we really do. Perhaps you need to take this up with Euty.
Well, of course, “The Catchall Forum”
The Circular File
Link A Dink A Dink
Chum Bucket
Y’know, comments on Cecil’s columns and comments on staff reports have almost no traffic. Maybe we could merge them into one forum, and also say "This is the place to comment on Wyrd Yrls and spotting Threadspotting threads. Although, the threadspotting thread itself would seem to be the place to comment on the threadspottingness of the thread.
Also, what about a feature where each column has to the correct forum, to drive traffic from Cecil’s columns to the message board?
Hors d’Earls?
First, despite what Jerry Garcia says, it’s “wired” on cocaine, not high.
Emphasis added by me.
The logic of “it’s a big topic, so it’s too much to moderate in a single forum” is contrary to how threads about movies and television shows are handled. That’s a much larger topic, and yet they all get their own (single!) forum.
As to the bolded part, no there isn’t, really. There is not a good general discussion board about sports anywhere on the net. Can you point me to one, or do you just assume there is because the net has everything? Believe it or not, the SDMB is one of the absolute best places on the entire internet for sports discussions, despite the antipathy the mods (and much of the membership) feel towards sports in general. In the thread “Is there anything the SDMB could beat every other message board in existence at?”, [post=7331498]RickJay offered[/post]:
I would posit that a poster’s favorite forums are completely unrelated to their interest in sports. While a factual sports question currently belongs in GQ, I strongly suspect that GQ is the worst forum in which to reach the knowledgable sports fans. (Not that I’m an expert, but I do know some stuff and I almost never go there. And there are plenty of others like me.)
If sports were all contained in a single forum, then all the sports fans would be much more likely to see all the factual sports questions, and thus those questions would be more likely to receive a robust answer. The same logic applies to polls and debates about sports.
The current fragmentation of the sports threads is actually an oddity on these boards, not the norm. [post=7231871]Here[/post] [post=7220438]are[/post] [post=7239892]some[/post] [post=7234185]examples[/post] of [post=6944096]factual[/post] [post=6955048]questions[/post] being moved from GQ to CS based purely on their subject matter. I’m sure there are plenty more.
Obviously, nobody would expect 100% compliance with this. But just like there was a discussion about the movie It’s All About Love in the pit, there could justifiably be the few outlier sports threads in other forums.
My position on the sports thread is best summed up by one of the “moved threads” quotes from DrMatrix in the thread [post=6944096]Help Me Remember this TV Show/Movie[/post]:
It is a factual question, but was moved to GQ because the subject matter has a forum specifically for the topic. If sports were given a forum for the same reason, I think the sports threads would “do better.” Not they they need their own forum; sports are so mundane and pointless as to be tailor-made for MPSIMS.
This is clearly not a new idea; Troy McClure SF proposed [post=4956377]the exact same idea[/post] almost two years ago. Dex’s reply:
Numerous other ATMB posts by various moderators have made it clear that the mods as a group just don’t like them. As in, moderators have to read threads, and nobody wants to do it. Hey, I get it, the mods are people too, and if they don’t like a particular topic, they aren’t going to champion their forum becoming the dedicated home for that topic. It’s just unfortunate that most sports fans around here have long seen this as a minor nuisance, and the official admin response is “if you don’t like it, go somewhere else.” (Phrased as “we do not want to be all things for all people.”)
Many posters have requested that sports threads be consolidated into a single existing forum (IMHO, MPSIMS, and CS have all been mentioned) many times over the years, and the mods have consistently responded with the standard reply of “forums are based on types of discussion, not topics.” When backed into a corner by pointing out that this rule doesn’t apply to movies, books, and music (which all get their own forum regardless of the type of discussion), they have admitted that it’s because they just don’t like them. That doesn’t seem to meet the standards of the SDMB in regards to sound reasoning.
Omni asked and articulated the exact position I’ve outlined here when he opened the thread Where do Sports threads belong?. In particular [post=6957877]this post[/post]:
Note: Much of this may sound familiar. The reason I’ve reposted these points here is because despite several moderators being involved in the threads where these posts were originally made, not one replied to any of these points.
**Ellis Dee: ** Great post. If I could have made that excellent of an argument, I would not have backed off my request so quickly. I think it is interesting it is a recurring question/request.
Maybe it could be put to the General membership for interest. There is almost always a few active sports threads all year round. The forum would probably get more activity than some of the smaller current forums.
**Ellis Dee’s ** arguments are worthy of review and considered reply. He put a lot of time into a well thought out reason why there should be a sports forum and did not just shoot out an unsupported suggestion like I did.
Jim
Although I don’t really have a dog in the Sports Forum fight, I was thinking of one thing that might help TPTB a bit. If EllisDee is correct in the summation that the current mods are just not sports fans, perhaps this might be a way to recruit a new mod? Send out the call for a new mod to be responsible for the sports forum. If all sports threads get funneled into this new forum, and there is a sports fan interested in being the new mod, that should help keep down the workload of the current mods.
(Perhaps there are even a couple of posters who could tag-team it to keep their workload down.)
I don’t think Sports are enough of a topic of discussion on this board, excepting the semi-annual Hate The Yankees thread, to warrant a dedicated forum. But I think they belong in CS, too. The Olympics would, so why not the Yankees?
Maybe we should just start a permathread like the City of Heroes one about the current baseball season, and so on?
Of course you should get credit for it. All I did was point out your own overlooked brilliance, so if such a thing were to occur the kudos should be all yours.
All your forum names are belong to Cluricaun…
My arse. You get wired on Red Bull, not coke. I should know.
But you make a fantastic case about sports having a specific forum. You’ve won me over on that one.
I would argue that CS is the best place for sports, as it’s a form of entertainment. I don’t feel MPSIMS has it in it to be that specific.
Maybe we should vote on it? I would think that the people who don’t like sports would prefer that they only have to put up with sports discussion in one forum, and I would think the people who like talking about sports would prefer to have one forum to see all of the sports discussions in.
It’s been done for baseball, FWIW.
There are two reasons I wouldn’t nominate CS, but given a choice between the status quo and all sports threads in CS, I’d take the latter. Note that technically, right now all sports threads pretty much do belong in CS, as the mods have stated, despite there not being the word “sports” in the forum description and the fact that no sports threads are ever moved there in order that they would “do better.” That consideration is given to all CS content except sports.
My main reasoning is that there are countless magazines that serve the same basic function as CS. As crappy as it is, Entertainment Weekly is a perfect example. It has entire sections devoted to movies, television, DVDs, music, and books. Pretty much sounds exactly like the mission statement of CS.
What will you never, ever find in Entertainment Weekly? Sports. Check other entertainment-oriented media. Ever see sports discussion on the E! channel? How about People magazine…any sports there? As far as I can tell, the only medium in existance that groups sports with entertainment is the SDMB Cafe Society.
I could point to Playboy as an example, where it does indeed cover sports with all the other entertainment, but it also equally incorporates Great Debates with countless religion and political articles, plus IMHO with its sex surveys of college students and whtnot.
Basically, there is nowhere else that devotes itself to movies, television, books, music, AND sports. Sports almost always are exclusively on their own, (ESPN), or are part of a much broader whole that incorporates everything under the sun. (Local evening news.)
The second reason is that with the number of weekly shows that always get a thread (like clockwork) in the Cafe, I would think that there is already plenty of content to fill it to the brim without sports.
I see MPSIMS and IMHO as equally suitable, but tend to think that fantasy sports threads should be in the same forum as general sports discussion, and I can’t come up with any logical argument for putting a fantasy league thread anywhere other than MPSIMS. Well, the Pit comes to mind, but it has been repeatedly stated that Lynn Bodoni will not tolerate sports threads in her forum. (Ever wonder why Airman Doors’ Steelers March to the Superbowl threads – famous for their trash-talking – were forced over to MPSIMS? It wasn’t to kill the trash-talking; that was just an unfortunate “bonus.”)
Ellis Dee, in response to your request for mod/TM input here, I’ll throw my two cents into this thread. (Note this isn’t the Official Position of the Staff, just my own thoughts.)
You clearly demonstrate that all the arguments used to justify Cafe Society could be used equally well to justify a new forum just for sports-related discussions. And you’re right. They could also be used to justify a separate forum for computers, for pets, for cars, for cooking, for relationship advice, etc. Cafe Society is our only topical forum, and if you’re going to do that for one topic, why not others?
I wasn’t a mod when Cafe Society was formed, but my memory was that the decision was a purely pragmatic one: discussions of movies and TV shows were beginning to dominate MPSIMS, so people who wanted to talk about other things had a hard time keeping their threads on the front page. If we’d had 30 different sports threads in IMHO on any given day, the same decision would have likely been made.
I have no problem with the existence of Cafe Society, but I’m generally opposed to further subdividing the board by topic. Yes, the forum structure we have now is a little awkward for some topics. (Now that I’m occasionally tasked with choosing the forum to move a thread to, I’m much more aware of how awkward it can be.) But I don’t think more topical forums would be an improvement.
As for choosing a forum where all sports threads should go by default, beats me. It seems to me that Cafe Society would be a good place, although IMHO or MPSIMS could also work. I’d be interested to see if we could come up with a consensus, as right now I tend to just play it by ear.
Weird Earl forum name - The P-Earl-y Gates
I’m not a sports fan, so I’m against the idea of a sports forum. Sports threads don’t bother me: I just don’t open them. OTOH, a sports forum would attract new members and bring in revenue. OTOOH, it’d bring in far more browsers than paying members, just like the SDMB does today, and performance would be no better even if the additional revenue was applied to hardware.
Fair enough, and thanks for the reply.
My understanding of the current policy is that sports threads are Cafe material, just like books, music, television, movies, and food. From [post=6956920]here[/post]:
If sports are one of the topics that falls under the Cafe Society umbrella, (just like Shakespeare,) could they be moved in the same manner that all other Cafe topics are treated? Currently sports threads are singled out as being less worthy than television, movies, books, music, and cooking by virtue of not being afforded the same treatment.
Note that the current policy for topics in the Cafe generally results in pulling in all on-topic threads from GQ, IMHO, and MPSIMS. The Pit and GD both still have their (admittedly few) forum-specific entertainment threads. But I can’t think of a single entertainment thread that lasts very long in GQ, IMHO, or MPSIMS. (Upthread I presented five examples of GQ threads moved to the Cafe for the sole reason of them reaching a better audience. Is there any counterexample of a GQ about entertainment that wasn’t moved?)
I’m all for that policy. I’d just like to see it extend to all six CS topics, instead of just five of the six. Basically, treat sports just like any other reality show. (After all, they’re equally vapid, equally popular nationwide, and sport truly is the original reality show.)
I’m not sure I’d agree that the discrepancy is due to sports threads being deemed less worthy than the other topics. One could just as easily look at it from the standpoint of sports threads being less annoying than television and movie threads and thus less in need of immediate banishment to CS. 
I think that’s perfectly reasonable. I had missed January’s linked discussion about sports threads, so I was probably moving them to MPSIMS. I will now move them to CS as a general rule, unless of course they are appropriate for the Pit.