Suggestions

[Kosheh]

Oh I wasn't 100% crazy about changing the name, I'm just voicing the concerns of a few other people who felt that the name didn't fit with the other casual titles like "Help me!" and "Welcome/Goodbye!"

I'd rather have a serious discussion forum so I'll just touch on those things instead, and do the really annoying "pick your post apart" thing

If you only want serious posts in a thread, people will know to put something like [SERIOUS] in the thread name.

Whoa, seriously? I can't believe I didn't know that!
Where in the GD forum rules did it state that?

Serious discussions should be possible within the General Discussion board. There's no need for a board dedicated to people asking things that will just end up causing arguments and fights in yet another board.

They theoretically possibly might be able to be done (technically!) within the General Discussion board given the forum's structure and more sensible forum culture. Unfortunately, with the new relaxed rules in GD as well as GD historically being more of a casual area to talk about hobbies, it's difficult to talk about actual world issues while maintaining an intelligent perspective. It's happened sometimes, with Koopaul's new Male Gaze thread and Sengir's Real Life post regarding transgenderism in the modern world.

Creating an actual subforum

• automatically sets a serious tone for the posters and posts
  
• this reassures posters that their topics won't particular be shitposted in (and we all hate shitposting, right? that's why there's no lounge)
  

A Serious Discussion subforum,

• allows for intelligent discussion, not arguments and fights (if you're getting mad over an actual debate that's pretty stupid, sorry).
  
• and all this serious discussion actually creates a stronger bond between the community
  
• it also ensures that the community is a little more knowledgeable on world issues (we can probably tell you that Israel and Palestine don't like each other, but no one here could tell you why. And probably 1 in 4 of us don't even know or care about it - and that's an issue)
  
• Users will be able to empathize better with one another on personal issues as well, (THIS is actually a big one - particularly on LGBT issues in 2014) and really allow some posters to shine
  
• Discourages groupthink within the community
  

With a subforum though, you could assign a moderator specifically to ensure that things don't get out of hand, and if they do, exercise a zero-tolerance policy. Currently if we did that in GD, you'd end up having additional responsibilities as administrators (and moderators, too) to ensure serious topics go smoothly.