Although I am still surprised/puzzled by where it seems to be a no-no to REQUEST prayers, but okay to have prayers OFFERED.
Actually, it's the same exact issue that we are discussing now.
Here is the rationale. Prayer requests spawn more prayer requests.
I could see it clearly. Once a few people posted prayer requests, we saw a flood of them from others for anything from a major surgery to a son/daughter getting into college.
And when they completely flooded the GCC section and I started deleting them, people complained because their topic was deleted while the other ones were still there.
So prayer requests vs. offers is about new topics vs. new posts in existing topics.
That was a long time ago, but it seems this same issue has caught up with us in the form of jokes or the other stuff we are discussing now.
Another thought - instead of the Personal Announcement section - change it to "Lamentations" and everything that could be construed as a "downer" could go there.
The PDA is
not a section specifically for negative posts. As a matter of fact, it's just as much about positive as about negative.