Do you have an offtopic section?

Does your site have an offtopic section for posts that don't belong anywhere else or not? Why do you support the idea of having/not having one?

 

Yep. Most certainly do.

 

Yes, I do have one. While I would rather the bulk of the posts be in the rest of the forum, once you get to know people, a community forms. People aren't *always* going to want to talk about that topic and sometimes they know the other people on the forum would be interested in a link or story, etc, that's outside of the niche. I would rather have a place for that content instead of it getting stuck elsewhere that it doesn't belong.

 

I dont actually see the point of an off topic section in a niche forum, though most of the forums certainly have it. But the posts in such sections are mainly the same threads that we see in other forums, and they are most certainly the threads that we keep answering in other forums. There is nothing new in these sections.

 

Yes. You kind of have to have one to be honest, no one can purely talk about one subject all the time. And every site I've seen which tried to get rid of it or split it into a seperate site died extremely quickly because of this.

 

We have a "General chat" forum which you could say is our off-topic section since that's where threads are posts are found that aren't exactly related to our forum niche. It's one of our biggest forums as well.

 

I have an Off-topic discussion and an Off-topic media forum. I am thinking of just combining the two though. I feel off-topic helps drive interest to the community on interests outside the forum subject (of course). I only allow registered users to view the off-topic section.

 

I think every forum needs a off-topic section, because you're trying to establish a community, and in a community the users should be able to discuss anything they'd like, so yes my forum has a off-topic section.

 

I'm also curious how many forum owner's "off topic" sections are the biggest areas of their community.

 

I can understand why people would do this but I'd like to chat a bit more on it.
Do you(anyone) think that you would get users to sign up and only post in those sections if they found them via search engines?