The idea behind the "Various..." topics seems to have been misunderstood, so as the person who christened or created most of these, I feel compelled to explain the logic that presided over their existence.
It may not seem obvious these days, because of the many months worth of effort put into making some sense of it, but the early years of this forum generated hundreds of topics such as "German projects", "Pre-war bombers", "Little-known transports" and the likes, which contained all and sundry, typically strings of posts with pics that had little or no text enabling to find their contents in a forum search.
Some of these topics could be over 20 pages long.
As a result, it wasn't unusual to have posts about the same aircraft or project in three or four separate topics, sometimes spread over two or three different sections of this forum.
The first task was to split each of those threads into meaningful groups of posts that could stay together; then regroup these new temporary threads with other existing threads on the same subjects; then rename the resulting topics and make sure they were now in the right section of the forum.
When the whole thing was over and done with, there usually remained standalone posts that did not contain enough info or images to justify the creation of a topic of their own. This typically happened with projects whose manufacturer was identified but the type designation unknown.
So, instead of having 15 separate topics called "Unidentified Junkers project", "Unknown Junkers bomber", "Undesignated Junkers fighter" and so forth (as was also often the case previously), it seemed coherent to temporarily regroup them in generic topics by company and era, such as "Pre-war Junkers combat types", so that people could add new elements with time, and discuss the existing contents.
I do not know if my activity as an global moderator can be traced back (nor if anyone cares) but if someone could go back over it, they could see literally thousands of splits, merges, posts moved and/or renamed. This was the core of my activity as a global moderator on this forum for years, and in fact the sole reason why I wasn't simply a regular moderator. This change of status was made to enable my reorganizing the old topics and trying to make sense of a lot of orphaned threads.
BUT the logic has ALWAYS been that when a type or project has enough contents to justify a separate topic, it then gets split away from the generic post to start a life of its own. The generic topics exist only to keep together in one place the pics and bits of information that are too sparse, too isolated, too insignificant to justify the creation of a topic. They have NEVER been the place of choice to start sharing about a project that is well-documented.
I hope this clarifies the subject somehow.
