Well I've never been a huge fan of spam forums. I think they lower the quality of a forum considerably. I've seen many forums in the past who have struggled for success and then added a spam forum only to have the posts / threads in the spam forum detract from the rest of the forums.
For Off topic stuff we have an Off Topic forum.
The rules are not intended to be overly strict.
I've just added a
chatbox to the forum.
You can either click that ^^ link or it sits at the bottom of the forum homepage. It's a good place if you want to post general hellos, drop silly links (not self-whore, you understand) and other hijinks.