Here's the thing: if the forums are given a name that's intended to sum up what happens here, that requires a clear, narrow definition of what happens here .
As you acknowledge, different groups of people have different uses for this site. Picking a descriptive name based on one particular use sends a very strong message that this is the "correct" use.
Call me crazy but "talking about lolcows" seems like the correct use for an Internet forum devoted to lolcows, which was founded specifically for the purpose of talking about lolcows, where all of the people are intimately aware of the nature of lolcows.
Most people
do gradually grow to stray from that core focus, and occasionally post here just to "talk to the web homiez" or whatever, play forum games, do social things yes, but that's not the core reason they come here in the FIRST place - logically, it CAN'T be the core reason they come here, in the same way that if you knew nothing about cars, you wouldn't go to a car enthusiast forum just to "hang out and chill". Remember that all words are just representatives of subjective meaning, and the meaning of a brand name is ONLY relevant to uninitiated newcomers. To the existing userbase, it is meaningless, because they have already formed their own "meaning" which supersedes anything we could come up with because it's in their heads, not ours. This is empirical logic.
We aren't excluding anything by promoting our core focus, because the people who come here to talk about shit other than lolcows have already shown that they don't give a fuck what the core focus is, they're going to talk about other stuff anyway, even if it isn't the core focus - and that's totally fine and nobody has a problem with that, that's in fact the entire reason we set up the Off-Topic boards.
Having your community derail from the stated core focus (whether it be lolcows, matchbox cars, or video games or anything) and just spend time talking with each other, even if it isn't about the core focus of the site, is an inevitable consequence of the way human beings interact within communities. Changing the name of the site isn't going to change that. It can't change that.
Sometimes a name is just a name. Would anyone
actively refuse to shoot the shit in Off-Topic if we changed the name? Would you really
stop posting here if we called it something else? I fucking doubt it, because you've already (presumably) formed connections and relationships with other users, which will continue to persist regardless of the name of the site. Nothing we can do is going to change that. I think you are
vastly overestimating the amount of power the staff and administrative changes have over the "forums culture", and vastly underestimating the user base's perseverance and stubbornness despite anything we could ever do.
I literally do not give a fuck what we name the forum because I will still post here anyway even if it is named CHILDPORN.GOV, I just think that whatever we do, we need to make the decision based on logic, not reactionary emotion.
I don't mean to sound like a know-it-all, but a lot of your fears are based on things that are totally speculative and based on, well, your feelings - I think a lot of that comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what branding actually does and doesn't do (as well as how communities form and function) and I think you need to step back and look at it from a purely logical perspective because you're coming off as a little hysterical.
