I couldn't agree more. This forum has developed this whole culture of shitposting that feels very unsettling to me. I'm not really sure how to approach it, though. In the past, we've always just tried to drown it out by posting HITs or doing what we can to make sure that work-related questions are being answered, but as you can see, that has very little effect.
Sometimes we try to be a little more direct and we'll ask that people tone things down or move something to another thread, and we end up with 10-20 people all giving us snarky replies or just blatantly ignoring our requests. The whole wrestling gif thing is a good example of this. People will go nuts with it at times and our attempts at dealing with it are always met with people shitting on us. And this is coming from many of our main posters, so it makes it difficult for us to really put our foot down because it just ends up with the whole forum up in arms about "out of control mods."
So, what do we do? Do we just start banning everyone? I don't think that's the right way to approach it. And the more we crack down, the more people we tend to alienate. We're happy with this community and the people that we have here, so alienating half of our top posters isn't something that we want to do. But it has become so ingrained in the culture here that I honestly don't know what to do. A culture shift requires everyone to chip in. We only have nine staff members here. We can't do it ourselves.
I want it to change, though. I think we can be a work forum that maintains the strong social atmosphere that we have, and still cut out this culture of shitposting that seems to currently exist here. I'm open to suggestions.