NeilGunton

I would be ok with this in theory, but I guess it would depend on how it was presented in practice. I'm not all that familiar with the software used here on Bikeforums, but if they have the capability of having a "sub-forum" or related forum which is just listed somewhere like a sticky, then it might be fine... but it all depends on how it's presented, and how much additional friction and clutter it introduces in the user interface for people who are really just interested in the regular bicycle touring forum.

I would care for the same reason I care about spam or other off-topic content. It's not harmless to have that stuff on the page in front of you. It takes up space, and you have to spend time processing it and excluding it, and people don't always make it clear in their subject lines what it is they are really talking about. For example, take a subject like "Have you seen this awesome new invention?" - in a bicycle touring forum I'd naturally expect that to be something directly related to, well, bicycle touring, and not (say) the world of electric motors or bike battery technology. And so on a dedicated "bicycle touring" forum, there would be a higher expectation that this link is "safe" to click, and worth my time. This is one of the reasons why I come here - on a good, on-topic forum, the signal to noise ratio is presumed to be quite high, so it's a safe bet that clicking on a link like that will actually be relevant to my interests. But if we just start saying the site policy is that "talk about motorized options like e-assist and e-bikes is fine, just ignore it if you're not interested", then that increases the noise level and lessens the value of the forum to me. I'm not saying that e-bike talk would be spam, but it might as well be in terms of my lack of desire to read about such things on a bicycle touring forum. That's part of why it's important to hash this stuff out, and why it doesn't make any sense to me when people want to say "it's all good, just ignore it if you're not interested". Signal to noise ratio... if the noise gets too high (and what constitutes "noise" is personal, obviously), then people start to leave. I think it would be sad if people started drifting off elsewhere simply because they felt the forum had lost its way and taken on motorized travel as being an ok, integral part of the discussion here. So you've got that tension between the "let's include everybody" folks and the "keep it about actual bicycles" meanies, I guess. And that's what we're trying to hash out here through rant therapy.

Neil