Reply #185: We considered doing something like this.

[Skinner]

Our idea was to split GD into two forums: A "Premium" GD with articles and long-format member vanity posts, and a "Chat" GD with short-format member vanity posts. In fact, we came *this close* to doing it. But after we spent a long time thinking about it, and eventually decided against it. The reasoning is a little complicated, but I'll give it a shot. We became concerned that the "Chat" GD would actually have more activity than the "Premium" GD. And members would start to see that as the prime real-estate on DU because it seemed to have more eyeballs. Once a particular forum starts being seen as "the place with all the people," then people will try to come up with ways to shoe-horn their threads into that forum, even the stuff that was never intended to be there. Then, you get a snowball effect, and everyone ends up in there.

Instead, we are considering a slightly different solution, which was not explained in my post above. In GD, one of the new topic areas will be something like "Short Topics/Chat". All threads that do not meet a certain minimum standard (say, 500 characters) *MUST* be posted in the "Short Topics/Chat" category. Then, members would be able to filter out all the one-sentence vanity threads from GD. Also, that would keep most of the one-sentence vanity threads out of the Topic forums as well. And, as a bonus, the admins could completely hide the one-sentence vanity threads from unregistered visitors.