I think every forum needs, in one form or another, a section where anything happens. RealGM (generally a basketball forum) is a good example of this. RealGM is one of the busiest forums in the world, with hundreds of people posting every minute. Due to the traffic, it's heavily policed by dedicated teams of mods for each section of the forum. For all of the "regular" sections, people are given a very short leash and law and order are in effect, so to speak.

However, there's one section called "General Discussion" which is actually a disguise for a dump where thousands of people on the forum can go and shitpost. The amount of traffic that General Discussion gets is mind-boggling. That one section alone probably gets around 50 posts per minute. Like the flame pit, "General Discussion" is only visible to registered members. Overall, it doesn't really have any effect on the rest of the forum.

Even without all the policing in the other sections, I've never seen garbage from General Discussion leaking out onto the other sections. I think that has been the case as well on Gotwoot, but at a much smaller scale.