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SIAI/FAI is explicitly NOT what Lesswrong is about and is often referred to as "the organization that must not be named" and things like that by more senior members.

Why I think this is not the case:

• Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote: "I mean, it seems to me that where I think an LW post is important and interesting in proportion to how much it helps construct a Friendly AI, how much it gets people to participate in the human project..."
• The Sequences have been written with the goal in mind of convincing people of the importance of taking risks from AI serious and therefore donate to the SIAI: "...after a few years of beating my head against the wall trying to get other people involved, I realized that I really did have to go back to the beginning, start over, and explain all the basics that people needed to know before they could follow the advanced arguments. Saving the world via AI research simply can’t compete against the Society for Treating Rare Diseases in Cute Kittens unless your audience knows about things like scope insensitivity..." (Reference: An interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky).
• LessWrong is used to ask for donations.
• You can find a logo with a link to the SIAI in the header and a logo and a link to LessWrong on the SIAI's frontpage.
• LessWrong is mentioned as an achievement of the SIAI (Quote: "Less Wrong is important to the Singularity Institute's work towards a beneficial Singularity").
• A quote from the official SIAI homepage: "Less Wrong is [...] a key venue for SIAI recruitment".

LessWrong is the mouthpiece of the SIAI and its main advertisement platform. I don't think one can reasonably disagree about that.

and [SIAI/FAI] often referred to as "the organization that must not be named" and things like that by more senior members.

For the benefit of any drive by future readers who are wishing to pick up the cultural norms here: The above is simply false.

SIAI/FAI is explicitly NOT what Lesswrong is about and is often referred to as "the organization that must not be named" and things like that by more senior members.

I am not sure about this - do you have sources? Especially so since SIAI logo is on every page (top right corner)

Yea. This.

I may be wrong, but I think that 'exalt' and 'smite' only tracks points for users, not individual posts.

No. Good point. LW could use a more social outlet.

I agree with that, a forum's the best place for them.

It would also be a good place to publish the behind the scenes messages of any future Diplomacy games once they are over.

Hm, well, Proboards is pretty much the "lowest common denominator" of free bulletin-boards (in other words, it has bad signalling value). Most of the time when people see a Proboards message board, they'll think that the board is most likely a low-quality board. Because most Proboards forums are low-quality (even though theoretically, there could be high-quality ones - although the high-quality ones almost always end up switching to an independently hosted server or vBulletin. Not that it's necessarily a good thing - I'm surprised why there seem to be no good discussion boards centered around Proboards)

Given the lack of activity on the proboards forum, I don't think a switch to vBulletin would confuse all that many people. And it would probably look better.

I don't mean to stray offtopic too far, but the IRC room is actually pretty good. There have been two or three trolls but they haven't stuck around for more than a few days.

They might have left due to moderation, but if so I wasn't around to see it. If it was then I'd say that's a point in favor of non-LW.com things doing alright with vigilant moderation.

Right; I actually retracted that once it was pointed out that the forum had already attracted a troll and I started thinking about it. I probably should have just edited it down to nothing... I sort of miss the delete button.