Many of us have limitedtime to use the Message Board and some days that is the only
section I have time to read.
Over time, the most common type of complaint I received about the General Chit-Chat topics listed on the Recent Topics page is
exactly what you said. The only thing is they specifically
do not want to read non-quilting stuff.
So we have users with limited amount of time who use the Recent Topics page to catch up with the latest discussions.
The problem is some of them want to socialize here more than read about quilting, while others want the opposite -- they want to read quilting discussions.
Neither one of those groups of users is right or wrong -- simply different ways of using this site.
Normally, it would be a tie, since I don't want to make the site less usable for someone on purpose.
But since it's a quilting website, it makes sense to go with the group of users that want to read about quilting more than other topics.
Also, some of our members work hard
to find resources on the net for the rest of us.
I'm still not sure about the Links section. I might add it back. The problem here is that new links seems to be posted in batches. I don't know why people do it, but I see the pattern over and over. Some days, there aren't any new links, and then 10 or so posted within just a few minutes.
That pushes all others topics on the Recent Topics page down by 10 or so positions. And any user that checks the Recent Topics page after the latest "batch", would see a collection of links instead of a balanced mixture of various types of posts.
That's the most common complaint about Links in the Recent Topics list.
Once I figure out how to add links to the Recent Topics without actually clogging up the whole list, then I'll turn them back on. For now, it requires some thinking.