First off, I can't post in the bugs sub-forum for some reason, so I'm putting this here. Yes, I know its the wrong place but before I go put up a whole bug report I would like somebody else to confirm that what I think is going on with this bug is really what's happening. I don't want to waste Toady's dev-hours running down a false lead because of some fluke specific to my fort/installed mods.
I had a fort in it's second year and I noticed my dwarves were all getting distracted because their social needs were not getting met. This was a fort-wide issue, not just my military. I had a large tavern that was attracting visitors and had lots of socializing going on, so it wasn't from a lack of a place to do it.
I pretty much shut down the fort to give everyone time to hang out, and sure enough they all went to the tavern and started dancing, drinking, reciting poetry, etc. However they got no happy thoughts or need fulfillment from doing so. I observed multiple dwarves complete their social acitvities and go back to work as if they never happened.
After screwing around a bit more I *think* I figured out the cause. My tavern had originally been two Z-Levels, one for the tables, instruments, dance floor, etc and a smaller area directly above that for a booze stockpile. This kept my tavern pretty while still allowing bartenders to serve. However it also caused a lot of dwarves to socialize in the stockpile (they were getting the thoughts/satisfaction from this) and miss out on the huge dances my fort liked to hold.
Since being in a dance fulfills far more needs than just watching a performance I deleted the meeting area that was the upper part of my tavern. Shortly after I noticed that my tavern was not fulfilling any needs even though Dwarves continued to use the lower part normally. I deleted my entire tavern and made a new one that was a single room, and the problem went away. Can anyone else get this to happen?