I find in some forums the issue is the group think enforced by moderators.<p>The StackOverflow forums suffer from this as they are community moderated and many questions get closed as Off Topic which basically are chats about something tangential to the area or opinion but are valuable none the less or I wouldn&#x27;t have gone to the page to begin with.  Effectively moderators promote group think.<p>Some bizarre things Ive seen in its computer science forum are questions being closed when about things like &quot;what are the current areas of research in blah?&quot;.  Somehow its gathered a bunch of crap mods and computer science doesn&#x27;t really get discussed there.<p>If its truly out of forum then these forums need to allow some kind of &quot;Open Discussion&quot; tag or move to another forum ability.