It should come as no surprise that I'm also not against a general discussion thread.

I'm just against a general discussion thread that will get 100 posts a day from the same three or four people, all posting meaningless responses about nothing whatsoever.

If we do a discussion thread, it needs to maintain discussions, progressing through the natural course of a conversation, moving from topic to topic as a group chat would inevitably do. Our fear is the inadvertent creation of a new spam thread, of course.

I'll never forget the day I'd gotten half a dozen PMs with complaints, and the spam thread got 900+ posts while I was at work and because of some flame war in the middle of it, I had to lock the thread and read EVERY POST until I could figure out who to warn for which posts. (It was before the post report system was included with vB.)