Why so little activity in the Coffee Lounge?

[techieMoe]

Also, I've never understood why "Coffee vs Tea", "Regular vs Decaf?", "Which World Cup team is the best?", "what kind of pet do you have?" discussions are intrinsically more valuable than "Suse vs Gentoo?", especially on a linux forum.

They aren't more valuable, but they're a lot less likely to cause a flamewar (except perhaps the World Cup one).

You and the other mods know more about linux and Unix than I will likely ever learn, so I can understand why these discussions are pointless to you. But does that mean that the rest of us sholdn't decide what is interesting to us and what is not? So long as they are appropriately titled, we can ignore the threads which seem pointless to us personally. If no one cares, the thread goes away all by itself.

Although I certainly see your point, "which distro" is such a popular question that if we didn't actively mod it away, I think we'd have "which distro is best FOR ME" threads popping up like mushrooms every day in the Coffee Lounge, which would result in a lot of duplicated answers that would really only benefit the original poster. Can you imagine a new user doing a search on "which distro" and coming up with 100 threads all with differing opinions? I prefer personally to encourage users to try several major distributions themselves and make up their own minds. If they have specific questions regarding a feature of one distro or another, they're welcome to ask them here.

[Vergil83]

on a unrelated note, what ever happened to the irc channel? I was posting a sticky to another which distro question, and saw the sticky mentioned it....

[bigtomrodney]

One thing I'd like to bring up, and here with all the users is the actual use of distro/developer/whatever forums. There seems to be an attitude lately that anything in these threads should be a question. I would tend to disagree with this. If someone has a SUSE related piece of news or suggestion it should probably stay in the SUSE section excepting that it is frivolous or liable to receive thirty "Yes I agree" replies.

I would have thought the coffee lounge was more for off subject posts. If someone wants to suggest that say SMART package manager be used, or that there is a new killer app that solves X problem, these are perfectly valid technical threads in my opinion, someone where an experienced user can pass on information and directly answer questions in relation to it. To my knowledge noone posting here is getting paid so don't see that all posters should be treated as help desk workers and expected to answer. Where would the incentive to stay be? That may have been a bit of an exageration but I hope it served to illustrate.