The intent of this forum is actually not that clear. We may all cycle, and all be over 50, but there's actually very little relating to age to be said. It's not like I ride diferently than I did when I was 49.

On the "off topic" stuff, to my way of thinking, if you want to talk about your health and your wife and your gallbladder and your kids and a lot of other unrelated topics, that's better discussed in real life with actual friends and family than with semi-strangers on a forum. I don't object to it being here, but don't see much reason to post it, either. Forums are good and fine, but shouldn't be a substitute for personal interaction. So I come to the forum here, and there may be a thread I'm interested in, and another I'm not, and that's fine, I'll read one and pass over the other and no problem. I don't see that the forum is getting too cluttered, so I don't see a lot of motivation to start moving stuff around.

If the only forum you visit on this site is the over-50, I think you're missing quite a bit. I'm over 50, I'm overweight, I ride a road bike, on long distance rides, ride a tandem, have cargo bikes, ride "generally", for recreation, so there's a lot of different categories that include content of interest to me. If I'm going to disregard stuff written by 49-year-olds because they're not 50, that seems to be a rather pointless limitation. In real life, most of my co-riders are around my age, but some are a few years younger, some a few years older, and I appreciate them all. One of the frequent contributors to the tandem forum is 80 or so, and I'm glad he doesn't confine his activities to the over-50 forum; he adds a lot to the tandem forum.