There’s a bunch of boilerplate in a lot of these category intro posts. I kind of want to leave the ToS/privacy policies mostly alone since they were in theory written by people smarter than me with specific subject area knowledge, but the category posts need some love.
Anyone interested in helping with this? Writing that kind of boilerplate is just above taxes on the “things I enjoy doing” list. 
Happy to help, I just don’t want to do it all myself.
What exactly are you looking for?
Edit, I probably wasn’t clear. I do think I have a general idea, but I’m not 100% sure if I’m right.
Anyways, I don’t see why I can’t help somehow. If you have questions, contact me on Discord, Rich#5531
So you want short descriptions of the categories? OK, let’s see what I can do. These are quick drafts, do with them as you will:
Announcements: News about site updates, rule changes, new staff members and other important events will be posted here.
General: This is the space for general game-related discussions. Go here if you wish to announce a new game, share your thoughts about a game or the gaming scene in general, ask for advice and so on. Keep it on-topic, please.
Linking to and promoting games with copyright violations is not allowed. Talking about games made from stolen code is not allowed. Complaining about being unfairly banned from a game or otherwise bringing its drama to our community is – you guessed it – not allowed.
(I still feel like we ought to have a separate room for New Releases like AG.net does. Perhaps with a rule that only the developer can post in the topic, or something like that?)
Development and Design: This is the space where any discussions related to game making take place. In here you can ask for and share coding advice, look for team members, share alpha and beta versions of your games, share code, sounds, voice-acting talent and other game making material, etc.
Due to their tendency to devolve into fights, topics discussing which programming language is the best are not allowed. Nor is attacking people based on their language choice; people should be free to use whatever works for them.
(Of course, that would mean no more justified bashing of BGT either … should we make an exception for that? Nah, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.)
Site Feedback: Use this category for reporting bugs, suggesting features and other changes, asking questions about the site and other meta discussions. Please be respectful to the staff, or we will have to respectfully show you the door.
The Lounge: Congratulations! By being a longstanding and productive member of the site, you have earned access to its off-topic room. Here, you can converse things that are not game-related, such as accessibility, art, cooking, DIY, humor, technology, etc. Please note that even here, any controversial topics such as politics and religion are strictly forbidden. If you wish to express your opinions about those, we urge you to do so on one of the many other platforms available.
(This is me assuming that The Lounge is basically our off-topic room. Is there something else you were planning it to be? I feel like this would be a neat compromise, giving permission for off-topic chat only to people who have proven themselves. We might need to lower the requirements some, however.)
I am not much good at this, either. Hopefully someone else can chip in, and if not, this is better than nothing.
Ok, so I think I have a decent idea. So, here is my draft.
Announcements: this section contains news about the site. Some of the things you will find here include updates to the site and changes in the administration team.
Gaming general: Come to this room to share new games you’ve found, discuss game related news, and ask for help. Please note that asking for or sharing cracks is strictly prohibited, and if you are discussing spoilers, make it known that your post will have a spoiler. Finally, you may not, under any circumstances, distribute or discuss clones.
Site feedback: Have a question about how something works? Experiencing an issue with the site? Post it here.
New Releases: Have you created a new game that you want to put out there? This is the place to put it. Same rule as in Gaming General. No clones allowed!
Development: Have a coding question? Working on a new audio game engine? Have a project that is not ready to be released to the general public? This is the place to go.
Lounge: A room for all general discussions. anything from books, music, movies, software, accessibility questions, and more. Just like with all other rooms, distributing and asking for cracks is strictly prohibited, and you may not under any circumstances share links to illegally download copyrighted content
Whether you’re good at it or not, you did it and I didn’t, so thanks for that. I’ll work some of these in tomorrow–beer:00 has begun here and I’m done doing serious things for the day.
Sorry I didn’t copy the category names exactly, but hope that helped
Thank you both. I’ll do a mix-and-match over the weekend and get the topic category descriptions in shape in the next few days.
Glad I could help. If there’s anything else, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I unfortunately can’t do anything in regards to coding, but anything else I should be able to help with.
Gonna chime in and say overall I like it, but I thought there was a dark mode checkbox on the top menu, or am I going nuts?
My biggest gripe is that moving via landmark on Orca is clunky. However I’ve put some ideas in the main Discourse with a screenreader topic and seeing how that goes.
I do wonder though, @Nolan if you could experiment on a dev instance with having the post # lines as landmarks perhaps?
On meta.discourse.org for instance, heading 1 is usually the top of the thread, so I’m not sure if it’s me coming over here from meta.discourse and not being able to quickly leap to the top of a thread with heading level 1 is throwing me off a bit or…
Thanks, everyone. I’ve incorporated most of these.
To clarify something, we have two off-topic areas. Uncategorized is the general off-topic area everyone has access to, while the lounge is reserved for members with higher trust levels.
My thought is that the lounge might eventually turn into a place to brainstorm community ideas with more engaged members. I want to leave it as it is for now because the Discourse folks have put lots of thought into community building, and if they’ve included a lounge category in a stock installation then it may be something we want to think twice before changing. Chesterton’s Fence is my guiding principle for now.