OK, I've been out of pocket for a while because of illness, but I've tried to keep up with things.
Here are my final thoughts on the subject. (I can hear the "thank you lords" now. Lol) You wanted concrete suggestions, not just "I think, and I wants".
Admin, first I am going to state that as a health care professional, I have learned not to call a doc in the middle if the night about a patient and say "I don't think patient x is doing well....." I had better have concrete facts, numbers and assessments to back up my concerns. Also, when presenting any decisions on why I did something, I had better have good research results to back me up.
I just went to the general chit-chat section. You said that the negatives were beginning to outweigh the positives. Many people (I thought about going back through this post and counting, but I got out of the hospital about 8 hours ago and frankly am going back to bed after this post) said that they would prefer a separate jokes area because their observation has been that jokes have taken over. On the first page of GCC today, there are 6 jokes out of 22 posts (27%) . On page 2, there are 11 jokes out of 29 posts (38%), on page three there are 6 out of 29 posts (21%). From there I just picked a couple of pages at random at least 10 pages back to be sure I got a sample from before the changes. I found on an average page with 30 posts, that 5 of them (17%) would be negative/requests for prayers/illness, etc, and 5 of them would be jokes. So while the perception may be that the negatives are taking over, the numbers I counted don't seem to bear it out.
I also am not at this time feeling up to going back through these posts to see how many people want the negatives to stay and how many want them to go to PDA, but I suspect the majority would vote for the former.
You say that you don't want to create more Stickies. People complain that they can't sift through the PDA's for important information.
Get rid of the Stickies that have recently been created that no one is posting to or looking at and make one for "Funnies". That gives you a net loss of Stickies. It's a win-win.
Take a poll of the members whether negatives should stay in GCC. You could start a thread and state that the answer should be ONE word. YES or NO. Any added discussion will cause you to automatically delete that vote. Do it for a set time period, say two weeks, to give those on vacation, out of pocket, etc. time to catch up and decide. Then announce the results and your decision based on those results.
Make the PDA sections editable by the owners. That way after a time they can go back and delete the general kind of stuff, the "Goodnight John-boy, good night Mary Ellens" and leave only the stuff that is important to them and that they really want people to see. That would cut way down on storage space, and possibly make more people stop by to at least scan.
Just my never-to-be-humble opinion and suggestions.