You've got to remember that some of the people that post here are newbies (me included) and find this BBS a great source of info.

Tod's a newbie too. The "noise" to which he refers is any post that's not directly related to the car player but isn't in the "Off Topic" forum. He doesn't have time to read through a 100-post thread that started out with a valid player-related question but diverged into a pointless discussion of some other topic.

Once upon a time, the amount of traffic on this BBS used to be low enough, and the clientele sharp enough, so that even when threads did go off-topic, it was still a good thing. Lately, though, it's getting hard to read the BBS without running into noise.