That's great Rachel, fantastic in fact. But I just used the Products thing as a random example.
Chuffed with the new Royals topic is too, now I just need to hide it!
So, back to the matter in hand. I'm pretty sure that loads of people post off topic in Chat and AIBU because it's a PITA / time consuming to find the right topic. yy they are the busyest but that's a bit of a self fulfilling prohey IMHO. What's the point in hand sorting all the old products treads from Other Stuff when a massive quantity of (more?) valuable threads on all sorts subjects are constantly not being stored in the archive because they are in Chat? When I was a newbie (not that long ago) most off topic chat threads went along the lines of 'Am posting this in Chat so it'll disappear...'. Haven't seen that disclaimer in a long time.
What are the chances of a bit of a topic reshuffle going on the to do list of doom? I can see that would be a massive job to recategorise everyting, but Rusty's suggestion is probably a lot easier to implement and would really help too:
Quoting Rusty so you don't have to search for her post:
I'm probably going to sound depressingly like the librarian I used to be here, but think it would help a lot if the alphabetical list of topics were to be (a) reorganized a bit and (b) made the default format, or at least fixed so that you could customise it to always show the a-z list.
At the moment for example, if you are looking for, say, discussions on clothes and shoes, if you change the list to a-z and look down the list you find 'Clothes and Shoes' then 'Clothes and Shoes - children's' and 'Clothes and shoes- adults'
You want to talk about adult clothes, so you click on that but find it's actually for selling. So you go back to the topics list, only to discover it's reverted to the category list. So you go back to the top, click on a-z again and try 'Clothes and Shoes' and that's OK - except that a newbie may be completely unaware that the real stuff is actually going on under 'Style and Beauty'
All the For Sale topics are just listed in the main a-z index under their sub-headings, with no indication they are For Sale topics at all - would it be possible to have one For Sale entry in the main index, which you click on to get a sub index of all the various items.
Another topic that would benefit from this is Mumsnet Local - as it's a real pain to have to scroll down past all those to get to the second half of the alphabet. I think For Sale and Mumsnet Local are places that you only go to if you actually want to go there iyswim, so a second click to get there shouldn't be too much of a pain.