I might liken us to a group of people who met at a series of wine tastings given by some restaurant. Initially the topic of conversation amongst the people at the wine tastings would most likely be exclusively about wine, but as the people got to know each other after several meetings more and more other common interests would begin to become topics of conversation. Everyone would be there for the wine and some people would have interests not shared by the entire body of the community, but I feel it would be unrealistic to expect that the topics of discussion would have to be limited entirely to wine, particularly if the wine tastings were the only place that these people met.
Certainly we have opportunities to meet one on one outside the confines of this board. This one in particular met another one on this board with whom he has had many very satisfying meetings, but we should not deny the possibility of group meetings of friends from this board. The PM system would have to be completely revamped to allow this and too many of us do not consider the Chat Room solution to be in any way workable. We can try to keep Subject Lines up to date, but even that is not entirely satisfactory for those of us with severely limited bandwidth. Waiting for a long thread to load can be deadly. All we have is the board itself. Maybe what we need is to convince Anu to let us have explicitly non-linguistic forums. We could have politics, religion, sports, drama, entertainment, books, whatever.
