Recently, Wesnoth's Off-Topic forum has fallen victim of a virus that had already attempted to take over our community long time ago. Forums games are a fun application of the board system to have some fun in social zones, but they sometimes get annoying.

They get particularly annoying when all the people involved have little or no creativity at all. There was a “Ruin a Wish Foundation” thread in Wesnoth's Off-Topic forum for a while until I locked it to try and see whether anyone would care. Some people did, and in fact, a new “Ruin a Wish Foundation” thread was started shortly afterwards. I simply let it go this time, but the amount of repetitiveness in the game's posts is getting pretty irritating.

Meanwhile, the incredibly hard-to-read “Three Word Story” game is also taking up space, and serves only as an unsettling showcase of these forumers' inability to come up with something different and amusing such as the “Limerick Duel” thread.

All in all, the Off-Topic forum will continue to be doomed to autopruning if this madness continues.

This is particularly terrible because the primary excuse used by the Powers That Be™ to justify the autopruning of Off-Topic is disk space, with pointlessness being a secondary excuse. Autopruning was introduced during times when the Wesnoth.org community forums were hosted on a server that wasn't under our control. This has certainly changed nowadays, and I honestly can't see how it's more important to avoid increasing Off-Topic's size in posts (where normal users can't add attachments) while individual art and music threads in other forums can use take up even more disk space thanks to enormous (occasionally gratuitously redundant) attachments. So, while space is no longer an excuse, the pointlessness seems to be a plague that we can't exterminate. Yet.

As I said not long ago in a certain post in Off-Topic:

Off-Topic is the name of the forum. This has never meant that you can go wild and be stupid or such (“off-topic”) in here.