Honestly, co-opting a single, unrelated post and turning it into a monolithic thread about "politics" or "dreams" just seems like a really really bad way of handling things. I'm trying to think of a better solution for organizing the random irrelevant conversations that will certainly develop in any community so that the comments about any given post stay mostly about the post, but it's kind of tricky.

My current top idea is to set up some forums with top level items like "in passing" (to talk about the site and site issues) and "politics" and "dreams" and what have you, and that way posts about those things stay isolated where you only have to see them if you want to, and the main comments stay free of the discussions that make new readers afraid to comment.

As for the original "big threads" (which are notably, the politics thread and the "passing by" section from the old site (which isn't actually on the new site at the moment)), I think the best plan of action will be just to archive them as static html pages, so you can go back and read them, but other than that they'll be effectively "dead threads" -- if you want to continue any of those old conversations, you'd need to start them in the proposed forums.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this plan?