The off-topic chatter bothers me at points, and there are a few things to alleviate that. I've used these to a varying degree at another forum.
One is to have a "Chat" thread, that can contain various different conversations and add a feature to the site. It didn't work on the forum I run, as it's demographic is a younger age.
We at one point had a "How many replies can we get" thread. This became troublesome after a while, due to the thread reaching north of 200,000 replies. The owner shut it off at just over 253,000 replies. The server load from that one thread was enourmous.
My thought is that unless it's on-topic, keep it in a chatroom or in a specific thread in the Off-topic Forum.
Unfortunately, that confounds the idea of "Community" and discourages a bit of the familiarity necessary to build a community.
No real good way to solve it, other than to keep it to a minimum.
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