Open Thread: Should SAB Have More Open Threads?

I got this email from a reader yesterday:

Rob,

A humble suggestion: Put up an open thread once a week. They always generate some interesting stuff that might not directly relate to any current articles.

Mike

I’ve never felt like there’s been a ton of interest in regular open threads on SAB. Usually I put them up when I’m going to be away from the blog during regular blogging hours. But maybe I’m wrong?

What do you folks think?

On a somewhat related note, you may notice some weird stuff going on with the “most commented” list on the sidebar. The widget isn’t counting up all the comments right. A lot of comments aren’t being counted, for some reason.

I suspect it has something to do with Disqus not syncing comments back to SAB’s database correctly. Anyway, we’re working on it. I know a lot of you readers use that widget to zero in on the hottest conversations on the blog, so hopefully we’ll have it back soon.

Another note, sorry about the slow load times and outages this week. With some of the big stories on the blog in the last week traffic was just too much, but we’ve finally got caching implemented now so things should stay speedy in the future.