It'd be a really stupid feature. IRC and IRC clients are already built for this. Why re-invent the wheel? It's not like you even want to encourage people using SAX: it's slow, unreliable, and ultimately a big pain in the a.

I actually have to agree with this. I think it's fine the way it is right now, and maybe we could make it better by asking people to be a little more respectful. I feel that multiple channels would be confusing and slow down conversations.

The problem we are having is the fact that two or three people can be chatting about what this forum is actually about, technology and programming development, when suddenly someone comes in and mentions 'minecraft' and suddenly there are 5-10 people overtaking the channel with minecraft chatter, which does not have anything to do with programming or technology development from the standpoint of this site and/or channel. If no one else is having an essentially on topic conversation, then discuss what you like so long as it fits within the TOS/etc.

That is really the only issue that has been coming up as of late, at least from my perspective.

My panties are very happy being wound up, thank you very much. And the implication that I'm female (or, what, girly? a cross-dresser? In any case, someone who wears "panties" rather than, say, boxers--which are what I wear) because I have a complaint about something not only betrays your own ignorance, but only helps reinforce gender roles and the gender binary. As a progressive group, we should be actively trying to fight against heteronormative stereotypes rather than using them in our arguments. Of course, you've demonstrated time and time again that you're incapable of expressing your opinion without belittling just one person, let alone an entire group, so I guess I really shouldn't expect any mature display of dissent from you. And I assume you're going to disregard this, or laugh at, or something like that, and I'm OK with that.

As for your actual argument, you do make a good point. It is a chatroom, and people are welcome to speak on many subjects. However, the channel and the forum do have an underlying goal, and when something is interfering with that goal, I see no reason not to exercise my powers as a moderator and moderate. As tifreak says above, the real issue is when there's an on-topic discussion happening, and an off-topic one takes over. Instead of the on-topic people having to go to a different channel, it seems to make more sense for the off-topic people to go to a channel where their discussion is on-topic.

Merth++ for the start of your post, specifically:
Also, I agree that multiple channels for SAX is a silly idea. I prefer everything to be in one place.

I'm happy to hear people speak out against channels for the sake of my sanity, and I agree it would be confusing. It's bad enough managing to direct users to SAX in the first place, although the on-page highlights help a lot with that. I agree that we're all reasonable and mature enough to be able to tell (with a small amount of gmod/admin guidance when necessary) when a particular conversation would be interrupting another more important one and should be taken to a topic.

Idioms, look 'em up.

Any further opinions on this? I'm also curious about the idea of forwarding various posts to various channels based on content, but I'd consider this to be only for special cases, like carbon-copying Suspended post notifications to #cemetech-staff.

Being an idiom doesn't make it OK.

Sounds like someone is on their period.

Better than being on their colon.

I am in support of this idea. Admin/Mod only topics shouldn't go to general SAX.

The issue of channels for SAX has been lingering in my mind for a while, because it is a feature that I think will be imminently useful for FreeBuild if I use SAX as the primary chat medium for it. How anything other than the main channel should be forwarded to IRC is another question.

Good point, not every SAX Channel needs a respective IRC Channel.

Well, if I was the one trying to have a conversation on a problem I was having (let's say a problem of C# code) from my perspective, I would defiantly not appreciate, if all of a sudden, there are 10+ messages about minecraft and I need to constantly scroll up in order to see what the guy I was talking to said.

Hopefully your monitor is capable of displaying more than ten lines.

I think SAX only displays 20.

And if each post they make about minecraft is ~2 lines, there goes the C# discussion. Using an IRC client is another way to combat this, but I don't think it's fair to people going around on actual non-calc related business (there's a lot of srs convos that would not be welcome over at #TI) to be flooded by minecraft chat. Go to #minecraft or post about it if you want, serious discussion should have the right-of-way. I don't think multiple channels will work well here, SAX is too small in size already for channel tabs (though making it bigger will just make it intrusive) and I doubt anyone will really use them anyways, wasted effort.

Side note, is there seriously a side-discussion going on about the use of a common English expression?

So click the "Pop Out" link - problem solved.

Or be an administrator, and get 30-line administrator SAX.

Personally I'm a fan of just ignoring SAX, that works *really* well.