I really think that this forum needs to expands its focus. I know that the main subject in here is the language and I can surmise this is one of the few language related forums on the net but still. I know that many of you has many things that you want to say and expanding the focus of this forum would be the way to make it happen. New categories would include: Games, Books and Literature, Movies and TV and Politics. What do you say?

I don't see how that would help at all. We already have a category called "General Chat" where you can discuss any of those things. Try starting some threads there and see what happens.

try another forum

I think that this forum indeed is boring, but I'd say it's due to lack of members not interesting topics.

I have to disagree with the original poster. Maybe if there was a particular topic that generated a lot of threads in general discussion then it would warrant the creation of a new section, but for now there are plenty of other quality forums out there on the web for discussing the topics you mentioned. I think having a general discussion section is good for the community aspect of a forum, but there's no need to create new sections to try to artificially generate discussion on a particular topic. If people want to discuss something outside of the main scope of the forum, they'll use general discussion.

This forum isn't "boring", it's just not got enough to block spam robots. If all the human users could try to talk over the spammers and keep the legitimate threads afloat, then that would help a lot until Simon finally gets the message and starts banning the spammers and/or scammers.
There's also not a lot of activity here. That's kind of sad and makes for some boringness.

Simon was asked to deputise some mods in order to keep the spam under control and he never did it, so this is what happens. That's why I'm jumping ship for the nonce. If he's not concerned what happens to the Omniglot Forum, why should I be?

Apologies for my neglect of the forum. I am concerned what goes on here, but don't spend a lot of time here as I'm kind of busy with other things. Whenever I enable user registrations, as I did a few days ago, the spammers just flood in. That's why registration is usually suspended. I am currently deleting all the spam accounts I can find.

The reason why I didn't deputise some mods to keep the spam under control was because I don't know how to, and am not entirely sure what that means - I'm no expert when it comes to the technical aspects of forums.

I've also tried to enable the editing of posts by users, and as far as I can tell the permissions are set up for this, but for reasons I can't fathom, it still isn't possible.

So if any of you would like to act as administrators and actually know how the technical side of things, just let me know.

It seems to me that other language forums also get more dull. It seems that the zbb has less contributors nowdays as well, compaired with some years ago.

I myself have pretty much moved on from linguistics. There are so many other intreresting things out there.