Why "Non-Food Chat" is now... Other Culinary Chat

One of the minor but persistent sources of confusion here has been the presence of a board called "Non-Food Chat" which nevertheless was moderated to remove any, well, non-food chat.

The confusion is over now. Non-Food Chat is... non-existent. In its place rises... Other Culinary Chat.

Here's what the story was. When we started this board we figured we'd maybe have 25 active people on it, most of whom had met each other at some point. So if we wanted to talk movies, sports or anything else, if someone wanted to plug the silent film festival (cough, cough), well, it was a lot like talking about such things over a table.

Well, it took about a day of open public registration-- by the end of which we had 106 registered members-- to realize that that just wasn't a realistic way to view LTHForum's future. We had lots of new folks and strangers, and glad to have you, but with the ever-growing number came the other potential for familiar forms of Internet trouble, all of which were a problem for the same reason-- distracting people and sucking all their energy away from talking about food. So we tried to make Non-Food Chat into Tangentially Food Related Chat, as judged by the moderators. After two years of minor but occasional confusion caused by that, it's probably time to just accept that "Other Culinary Chat" is a more honest and helpful descriptor. We'll still be a bit loose about that, if you can bring it back to food in some tangential manner it'll probably pass*, but if it's totally off the subject, or hits an Internet hot button, well, it belongs somewhere other than LTHForum.

One other thing we hope this clarifies is where to post something about an article about food. Food media was lumped, a bit randomly, in with Shopping & Cooking, but a lot of it tended to end up in Non-Food Chat anyway. Now we are making Other Culinary Chat, not Shopping & Cooking, the primary catch-all for such things, and will move old food media-related posts to this board over time.

Any comments or questions, a discussion thread has been started here.

* For instance-- to pick a thread I started myself-- the Illinois Tourist Attractions thread often seems to come back to food, since it's about exploring the area we live in and that does seem to come back to food for folks like us, funny how that happens. So that's the sort of thing that stays within the bounds, most likely. But the election or the season premiere of Lost is unlikely to lead back to food, unless you're mainly talking about the red and blue or tropical appetizers you made-- and it's also more likely to lead to distractions and problems. So we'd probably zap something like that, same as before.