Is your off-topic section dead? Too active?

If your off-topic section is dead (and on-topic stuff isn't), why? Or on the contrary, is it too popular? Is the majority of your forum's activity in your off-topic section? Do you see any problems with that or is it fine as long as your members are posting somewhere? Or do you have no off-topic section at all? If so, how has that worked out for you?

 

Well why would you care if the off-topic sections are dead? Isn't that a good thing? It says that your members actually like the topic and they don't care to waste their time on forum games and off-topic chat, right?

 

Our whole forum is off-topic :p
I like any activity, I'm not picky where it's coming from.

 

It could be a bad sign in that your community isn't very tight-knit and members don't feel comfortable enough with each other to have casual conversations.

 

Mine is thriving with ~2,000 threads containing ~42,000 posts. However, on-topic sections are several times more active so I judge that's OK.
Ridiculously, the most popular thread ever on my forum is in "Jokes" section, people play association game there. ~4,5k replies, ~116k views, started three and half years ago and was ever alive.

 

my off topic section is active, which is a good thing as it means members are enjoying talking to eachother and making friends, and the activity of the off topic section isnt too much of a problem as theres the same amount of activity on the other on topic sections.

 

I'm the administrator of what you might call an "arm's-length" off-topic board. I'm a member of a specialist forum which takes itself rather seriously. They've had an off-topic board in the past and it caused them a lot of problems - the off-topic posters were coming over to the main forum and disrupting the on-topic threads, meaning that those who wanted to discuss the topic sensibly were being drowned out. At the time the owner wanted to get rid of the whole thing, but he appointed a team of admins to sort things out. Eventually sanity was restored, and the off-topic board was deleted.

All this happened before I joined, and in the meantime there have been calls from some of the newer members for the reinstatement of an off-topic board, which have been firmly resisted by the admins. As a result I stepped in and offered to host my own independent off-topic board, which the admins kindly agreed to promote on the main site. For the first couple of weeks hardly anyone posted but me and I was on the verge of giving up. However, as soon as I announced on the main board that I intended to close it, interest started to pick up! After six weeks we've now got 27 members and discussions are starting to get fairly lively, although I still hope to recruit many more people.

What's interesting is that it's now starting to be used as a sort of "court" where the main forum admins can be held to account. We've just had a number of posts from a member who was banned from the main forum and felt he was unable to put his case, and the main forum admins have responded in kind. They have no special status on the board, of course, which puts me in the interesting position of being a sort of neutral umpire judging between the two sides. It's the sort of thread that would never have been allowed on the main forum and I was quite pleased to have allowed it to happen. The issue will never be resolved but at least it gave all the parties concerned an opportunity to let off steam.

What do you all think about this? Have you tried anything similar?

 

Off topic forum with 3,105 threads composed of 241,650 posts inside. Ya, we love the spam.

 

I do not like off-topic sections, it's nice that people barely post in it anyway.

 

I find it's the first category spammers go to, if they can post. Some 'nice' pople doing 'seo' will abuse it too, since it's easier to give a useless reply like 'me too', when you ask 'do you like winter' and not bother their little heads with my specialized topics. So now I'm running a small experiemend on my forums and have NO chat section at all. Introductions, news/feedback, marketplace, specialized topics. That's it. I'd rather keep the topics focused than wade though the same useless junk they post to get a link

 

My off-topic forums all combined together now make up 55 percent of my overall post so yeah...it is too active

;P