What say you to an "I Love Sports" board?

Also, it would clear up any questions about where to put a "C/D: Bo Jackson" thread.

Why though? There'd be no overlap between the threads about various sports because, well, a lot of football fans have no interest in basketball for example. It wouldn't feel like a community, just a place to put threads that other people, for one reason or another, don't want to see on ILE.

A Sports board would entail 9 football threads to 1 non-football thread probably.

I'm not sure whether I'd prefer further balkanisation or not. but this halfway house isn't quite satisfactory as it is either.

The World Cup and Wimbledon threads are really about as intrusive as, for example, the Big Brother threads, (i.e. not really - one runs until it gets too big then another one starts). Why hive them off to another board, they aren't exactly taking over anything? Also, what Matt said about overlapping in interests. People who dislike sports tend to go "ugh, sports, get them AWAY from me" but people who like sports don't automatically like all of them. I would have no interest in threads about cricket, baseball, American Football, basketball, etc, but I'd assume I'm one of the people that would be balkanised off to sports-hell because I like football.

This could obviously also be the new home to a lot of sports threads that don't have their own boards

They *have* their own board. It's called ILE. You should look up what the "E" stands for.

I don't think Fonzie Scheme is bothered by sports threads on ILE as much as the fact that all of the sports-related sub-boards don't see much action. I like the idea, actually. Matt and Ailsa are of course correct that plenty of people only like one sport but not all -- I mean, the only thing I really pay attention to is baseball -- but how is this any different from ILM, where metal threads compete with electro-house threads and few of the same participants post on both?

All the sports-related sub-boards are American-based, yes? Would I Love WWE be in this as well?

The difference being, I think, that music is more all-encompassing that sports. Why not stop people posting general film threads on ILE because there's an I Love Film? Why not have I Love Drinking In London? I Love Balkanised Threads?

This is a tremendously stupid idea for all the reasons already mentioned. It also goes without saying that, despite the existance of boards for baseball and American football, the playoffs and finals in both sports still get their own ILE threads, so I'm not sure what this would accomplish. No one who is not that interested in the sport but likes to watch the finals (of which there are about 17 trillion people in the world) is going to be arsed to go find an "I Love Sports" board to chat about it. ailsa is totally OTM, the only thing steve said that is OffTM is the thing about the "Sports" board being only football (have you actually looked at the other sports boards during the active seasons?).

This makes no sense, there isn't overlap necessarily between fandom. The reason a couple of the little boards came to exist is because of people showing up on the threads to do with those sports and giving people shit for no reason; conglomerating them all back together is silly. Conglomerate everything back to ILE, in that case.

I've gone full-circle on specialist boards anyway. I like the old model of ILE as an all-encompassing discussion forum. The more you hive off any given topic (sport, politics, film, whatever), the more you remove what's interesting about ILE and there'd eventually be very little left other than random chat threads. There used to be a load of really good book threads on ILE but ILB kind of hived them off and now there's nothing. ILB is nice and peaceable but I bet half those threads would be better with wider participation.

ILM is a different animal because it predates ILE and has a much higher profile anyway. I hear I Love Comics is good though.

I don't have a problem with how things are now, I was just lobbing the idea out there. I really only keep up with the hoops board with any regularity and I occasionally read up on the baseball and football boards and I wondered if I'd keep up with (or contribute to) them if they were all in one place. I know it'd basically save me, what, two clicks? But I figured it'd be more organized.

as the founder of the i love the nfl board, i categorically refuse to let my board be sullied by the likes of jeter and beckham and nowitzki