I voted to leave things as is. The trick here is that no conversations or topics are compulsory. Don't like a topic, don't contribute to or read it. The solution is as simple as that. Just because a post exists, doesn't mean you need to read it, respond to it, be worked up about it, or even acknowledge that it exists.
This FOMO (fear of missing out) mentality that so many of the forum members is perpetuating is what really baffles me. It drives people to get entangled in things that they needn't have been in the first place. You don't have to put your two cents in everywhere, and it's important to remember that the words and opinions of strangers on the internet are as plentiful and as important as the specs of dust that gather on your grade school excellence award.
At the end of the day, you don't have to feed the troll living under that bridge you're crossing.

Closing the off topic room is IMO not the way to go, there are alot of useful topics and answers in there and not everything goes up in flames over there.
Ban political discussion, true, we can discuss that, but closing it completely isn't the route I would venture on.

Greetings Moritz.

Well sure, but that's why I suggested that it be closed, not deleted entirely. You can use the Open Sound dialogue box in Goldwave as a file explorer, and it works fine. Doesn't necessarily mean you should do it. At the end of the day, this is supposed to be a gaming forum.

The only viable option I could find was to do nothing. I didn't want to use that option, I think that the off topic forum would benefit from rooms within rooms. How about subdividing it into a political room, a religious room, a computer room, a general room etc. That way, people would have to go to that specific room to post about their topic of choice. People will have no excuse to be toxic because they'll know full well what they're getting into when going into a room. People won't then be allowed to say that certain subjects must be banned because they all have their individual places/spaces. I would even go as far as to make it possible for people to block rooms that they don't want to go in to; let such an option be profile specific. Doing it that way will give people the freedom to talk about what so ever they wish to while other forum users don't have to be subjected to other people's blather if they don't want to be. I'm sure that some of you don't want to read my blather when it comes to certain topics and that's fine. That's why I suggest such a feature. I don't know why people don't use their common sense or allow people to use it... It's madness to not give the power to the people. It's our forum, let us do things our way and the one way we can do that is to give the people who post on the forum the power to tailor their own individual experiences on here. Don't want religious topics, let users block them. Don't want political topics, let users block them. Want to start a following whereby people must follow the man on the moon? The religious room will suffice for that. Don't want to follow or read about the man on the moon? Block it and you'll never see it again unless you go into your profile and unblock the topic and or room from your block list. Personally, I really don't see the problem here. Maybe someone here can explain it to me. Am I missing the point here? Am I misunderstanding the point of the pole and thread? If so then I apologise.

8. Don't forget that the website name is audiogame.net. So that would change the purpose. The off topic room is there so people speak about something that is not related to games. But if we make 50 off topic  rooms. I think then we should rename the website from audio game to something else

That's true. Should we then just stick to reddit or some other forum to vent politically, religiously or in some other way? Sure we could also create forums of our own and that will give us the freedom to moderate how we want to without stepping on the moderators' toes here. There must be some way of making their jobs easier while getting what we want. I did state in my moderator application that there is no way to enforce the forum rules fairly and I think we've just seen proof of that. Using punitive might, however gently, will still piss off the ones being punished. There must be some other way of tackling this but how to go about it? We wouldn't have this problem if people couldn't feel the negative emotions such as anger, hate, greed, jealousy etc but unfortunately, we do. We also don't like being told what to do, how to do it and we certainly hate being punished for what we do because we don't like to suffer. Is there a viable solution to this problem?

Political and religious discussions need to go. Clearly, folks cannot handle these discussions.

The problem with developers leaving is real. It used to be that the forum was the one stop shop for learning about new games and asking questions about them. Now, things have fragmented and some new games aren't even announced here.

I wonder if closing the off topic room completely might not be a good thing. Possibly if someone is up for a bit of masochism, a new forum for general discussion could be created, and a link provided from here until it is well established. Because, while helping people set up their Linux box, or find the perfect accessible toaster oven is awesome, it's not game related.

I also think it would be a great idea to allow people to post a "read only" topic. This means that developers could announce a new game, and if they really don't care about feedback, that would be the end of it.

I have also seen some posts from people who are really helpful and knowledgeable, then they get banned for posts that are... wel, not helpful. Maybe the ability to put those people on a system where each post has to be approved might be a better solution. This way, the helpful stuff can get through and the other stuff could just be deleted without causing a 50 page flame war. This would likely require more moderators at first to sort through messages from people on that list, but I think it would settle down after a while.

the off topic room should not be closed because the off topic room is not the issue. Really, this forum's worst excesses are pretty tame comparted to what I see on other forums such as reddit. This is the Internet, folks. If you only want to see things that you like, then you have to curate the places you visit to only include places where speech is strictly controlled so that that stuff can't get in. You could have a stronger-minded person check the audiogames.net forum for you, if you feel too disturbed by the content on it, and then they could curate their report on any new developments for you. As an alternative you could accept that life won't always give you what you want. It can't, because everyone wants something different, so it would be logically impossible to give everyone what they want.

@6 for the longest time I used goldWave's auto preview feature as my media audition feature of choice because I didn't want to learn reaper. I think that's completely fine. You implied that people who do use it are somehow inferior to those who don't.

@14 you're right that people can't handle the discussions, but prohibiting the discussions is not the answer. People need to grow up instead so they can talk civily about people and beliefs that are different from them. There was a time, it was only 30 or 40 years ago, when people could actually do that a lot of the time in the US. After the US was infected by this virus, and I call it a virus because it seems to spread like wildfire through the media to perfectly reasonable people who then infect others in close proximity nearby, social media and other consumerist companies realized that this was a great way to make more money and so they infected all of the first world with it. But we can be better. We can choose to ask questions that provoke thoughtful and respectful discussion. We can stop being scared little kids. We can have the nice things. But we have to give a little to get a little. And closing down the discussions completely shuts that off from happening.

Closing the off topic room is a ridiculous idea. If the administration gets to a point where they really don't want to handle off topic discussions anymore, which should be the only reason why it would ever be closed, they should just hire more. The fact is, places like r/blind are great but the off topic room is genuinely one of the biggest places on the internet for blind people to solicit opinions from other blind people. Plenty of other forums have off topic areas and in fact I believe that's the norm. It would be really stupid and shortsighted to shoot that in the head because of political topics that get out of hand when winy people with no impulse control click on them.

I think this is a good idea tbh.

no it should not be removed. as many others have said,  if you don't like the off topic room or any of the post's, just don't look at them. simple is that