wpegg: I feel kind of responsible here as I did do this in the past. However back then there were fewer threads, so there was not the need to solve this problem.
I agree that there is now a reasonable argument for allowing people to filter giveaways as there are so many. It's really nice that so many people are now being charitable and sharing, but that does make this forum hard to follow for those of us that don't compete.
I think a separate forum is a poor solution, you'll just end up with requests for subforums of each type of topic. If you take TheJoe's view of the general discussion forum, then it's purpose is solely for discussions on games. so then we'd need a world events subforum, a religious debate subforum, a "this person has died RIP" subforum.
I think filtering is a much better idea, however the problem with client side filtering is that (I assume) it would screw up paging, so if page 1 was full of giveaway threads, you'd only see a blank page. It would be much nicer if we were allowed to add tags to our posts to indicate their content. It wouldn't be too hard to add either a drop down, or a few checkboxes to our post (possible just for general discussion), then add a forum preference for the elements we aren't interested in. That way we all have our own specialised subforums without even realising it.
I don't really think it would be that hard. They could make a "general games", "general general" and that alone would do wonders for organization around here without splitting things too much.
A tag based system where things are posted to a subforum via tag, would be nice, the outward appearance would be that you're placing it into a subforum, when really, you're just tagging it and everybody could easily filter out the ones that aren't of interest would be nice.
But, ultimately, this would require some moderation, something that Mr. Gog is apparently allergic to.