I could not agree more to this, great post.
I don't know if you've noticed, but we (yes, me and you) are like the only two person that uses the Writer's Block these days, Social Groups was a thing back in 10-11 but has died since. Trust me on this I know, as I even have my own Social group with way over 100 members and it couldn't be more dead no matter what I try. Writing something in a Social Group... You might as well write something down on a piece a paper and flush it down the toilet, hoping for someone to get it, read it and reply to you xD
So the Social Group(s) doesn't count as a medium no more. There's a reason why I hesitated like crazy before I joined the Writer's Block, because I knew it would die sooner or later. Then we have the Contest threads... It's the only place we writers actually can talk and reach out to each other, so that's why people turn there, like Vilvake previously stated. Some spam and off topic posts are bound to happen there, but that happened before people started talking for real about FFs too. If we have an own place like Vivake (and Escorpiius) suggested, then that would help take off a lot of "heat" from the FF contest's "spamming" (if that's what you like to call it), and it would leave more room for people to talk about the actual contest (who they are voting for and all that), and it would be easier for people to find exactly those posts, instead of scrolling through 10 pages of someone talking about Tolkien and TLOTR before finding them.
Conversations about what Sam ate for dinner are bound to happen in the contests regardless, as long as Lawliet allow it to be, so that shouldn't be the same concern here, as with this platform, we will have some ground rules (much like the forum games and the chatterbox have) of what you can and can't do. Here's the thread I was referring to in my first post;
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It's a perfect example how the sport section has an own thread dedicated to football, and all talk happening there is about football (and it's reached over 46 pages since it was made by Escorpiius), so why shouldn't the FF section also have such a thread or a platform, I mean, the Art & GFX section have one like Escorpiius stated, and since the FF section is up for an update, then why not. This is the last thing I'm going to say in the matter though, time to let someone else do the talking for a change or this will never happen xD =p