Too many forums? (1 Viewer)

[Schweddy]

Are there too many forums? Has it become intimidating?

Thank you for your time... any feedback is appreciated.

 

[FallingPianos]

Are there too many forums? Has it become intimidating?

Thank you for your time... any feedback is appreciated.

I dont spend much time in the "in the news", "united states only" or "international" forums, but the "political forums" are perfect the way they are.

 

[chesswarsnow]

Sorry bout that,

1. No, I am happy for all these great froums, and I would like to add another one.
2. Lets call it , *CWN's FORUM*.
3. Great idea I am sure it will be a great hit!
4. Just an idea, where only people who make lists can post.
5. Otherwise you get a warning.:lol:

Regards,
SirJamesofTexas

 

[Billo_Really]

There's not too many forums. But since your down one mod, why don't you give teacher the other half of his mod powers. So he's a little passionate regarding his pet projects. He's also non-partisan, has demonstrated the ability to see both sides of an issue (many times) and he's paid is dues.

This is a little selfish of me. Because if you do, I hope it pisses him off!

 

[earthworm]

Anyone here know of the old MS groups " Free Speech America" moderated by Sam Burdette ??

I used to post there.
I think this one is set up much better, but Sam did have some excellent men on the forum - they, IMO, carried it. A shame that there were also those who wrecked it, thus he closed it down...He(Sam) may have caused his own demise by trying to be far too strict as a moderator..

I hope that never happens here.

A moderator has one tough task.
The goal for any forum should be to have as many professional people as possible use it, and rely on the info within the forum..

This forum does need some improvements.
I would like to see the "signatures" limited, made much smaller..

 

[aps]

I know this may show the anal side of me, but what about alphabetizing the subject titles under each category? Of course leave "the basement" at the bottom of the Political forums, but I think it might be easier to get to the subjects if they are alphabetized.

 

[Gardener]

IMO, the number of individual forums should serve the purpose of separating discussion into manageable chunks, but not so many as to create dead space. With too few individual forums, discussions disappear too rapidly as there are so many new topics that older ones get driven off the page. I have seen forums where it took only an hour or so before a thread was rlegated to page 2 because there were too many new topics. On the flip side, if there are too many forums, discussions die because few people are willing to click on such a multitude of topics, and so what happens is that people tend to post their new threads in the forums where they will see some action rather than the forums necessarily designated for such discussion.

I think it's only human nature that when people post, they want feedback, so the design of the forum should follow suit. Having too many as well as too few individual forums both leads to situations where people do not receive enough responses, and so the design should serve that function. If you are to create individual forums, I think you should do so for a reason and that reasom should be to manage the discussions rather than simply viewing the creation of new forums according to whim or because people have requested a new one.

 

[Little-Acorn]

IMHO there are WAY too many forums.

Someone said that having more forums "separates discussion into manageable chunks". How does separation make them more "manageable"? Looks to me that all it does, is make the topics people want to participate in, harder to find.

This BBS software is designed to pop any thread to the top of the forum when someone replies to it. An excellent idea - the most popular threads stay at or near the top more, while the threads no one is interested in, sink slowly out of sight. Separation-by-topic is unnecessary - this automatic separation-by-activity is a far more useful way to "manage" the forum. One need look only in one place during a hot discussion - the front page of the forum. No matter what the topic, the discussion you and the other member(s) are interested in, will be there.

The only problem that can crop up with this method, is when the BBS gets so many members that a whole lot of threads get lots of attention simultaneously. Then an active thread can still scroll off the screen onto the second page in a matter of minutes. In such a case, it may be necessary to divide the BBS into two forums. This would have both good and bad effects: it would keep popular threads on the front page longer, but it would also require members to look in two places for their topics instead of having all of them presented on one convenient page. And if you had TONS of activity, you might even need to separate them into three forums, thus tripling the inconvenience for the sake of having reasonably paced forums. The more divisions you have, the more cumbersome the usage becomes. But such inconvenience MIGHT be the only way to avoid the equally-cumbersome problem of a too-fast-scrolling forum.

But here I find this BBS separated into literally twenty or more forums! Why, on earth? Did somebody find that only nineteen forums, would all be scrolling too fast?

I note that many of them show that the last post they got, was a day or more ago. That doesn't sound like a too-fast-scrolling forum to me. Couldn't that one be combined with one or two (or ten) other equally-slow forums, to make one new forum that's interesting enough for people to actually go to?

Just a suggestion. Twenty-plus forums looks impressive, at first glance. But when most of them are nearly unused, they start looking a lot less impressive. What would be lost by combining them into maybe three or four that each get thirty or more posts per day? That's usually a pretty good number for an active, easy-to-use forum. From what I can see, the only thing lost would be the superficial silliness of almost-unused forums where an occasional topic goes to die.

 

[jfuh]

Actually I believe there are not enough forums. Often at times I find myself questioning just where to put the thread I start. Resulting in chucking it into "breaking News" and letting the mods decide where to put it.
Example, Promotion of alternative renewable fuels falls into breaking news, environmental, science and technology, US politics so on and so forth. Know what I mean?

 

[alphieb]

I think it prevents other forum from being inundated with numerous threads that are not relevant.

 

[Little-Acorn]

I think it prevents other forum from being inundated with numerous threads that are not relevant.

Not relevant to what?

If people want to reply to it, it's relevant to people's interests. What else matters?

Sometimes I feel this obsession some people have to shuffle threads and assign them into categories, is like certain people's desire to rearrange their sock drawers at home, putting all the red ones in this slot, green ones in that slot, long ones at the top, short ones at the bottom etc. In fact it serves no useful purpose, since they could just as easily find the socks they wanted if they were simply arrayed in the draw in easy view.

This BBS is owned and maintained by the people on the staff, admins etc., and it's a LOT fo work to keep it up. I've been there and done that, and know how hard it can be. They certainly have the right to set it up any way they want, divide it into categories (I went back and counted, there are no less then **40** different forums on this BBS!), color the background bright orange, make the text too teeny to read, or anything else. If they simply want to make it orderly to the point of being anal, they certainly have that right.

My point is simply that such over-the-top category division hurts the utility of the board. If the staff values ease of use over "orderliness", they've gone down the wrong road here. But if they consider it more important to have categories for every last thing, all different, no matter how hard people have to look for a post that might suit any of six different categories, then I'd say they have what they want.

 

[Euro_wisdom]

I only just registered, but I do feel like the "political forum" section has too many subjects. The forum looks a bit "crowded" at first. We don't really know where to start. I believe some topics could be merged.

 

[Schweddy]

Saturday morning, we will merge a few forums that have the least activity.
- Education / Health Care / Environment
- US Partisan Politics / Political Platforms

Next we will alphabetize the "Political Forums"

Keep that feedback comin'.

 

[FallingPianos]

Saturday morning, we will merge a few forums that have the least activity.
- Education / Health Care / Environment
- US Partisan Politics / Political Platforms

Next we will alphabetize the "Political Forums"

Keep that feedback comin'.

merge education, health care, and environment into one forum? the three have nothing to do with eachother...

 

[MrFungus420]

Personally, it doesn't really affect me one way or the other. I first hit the "User's CP" for my subscribed threads, then I check "New Posts".

I almost never go into the individual forums.

 

[Schweddy]

merge education, health care, and environment into one forum? the three have nothing to do with eachother...

Agreed, but these are the most underutilized. The name will still relect all three topics.

 

[aps]

Saturday morning, we will merge a few forums that have the least activity.
- Education / Health Care / Environment
- US Partisan Politics / Political Platforms

Next we will alphabetize the "Political Forums"

Keep that feedback comin'.

Woo hoo! My anal retentiveness is being implemented!

 

[MSgt]

Woo hoo! My anal retentiveness is being implemented!

Hehehehe...."anal."

 

[Little-Acorn]

So instead of having 40 forums in a BBS that can support maybe three, we will have only 37?

As I said before, there's alot of work that goes into setting up and maintaining a BBS like this. The people doing that work (owner, admins etc. certainly have the right to set it up any way they want. If that includes setting up in ways that make it more cumbersome to use, that is well within their rights too. Anyone who doesn't like it, can always form their own BBS and do the work themselves, and try to acquire and keep an audience.

Will moderators continue shifting threads from forums that get lots of visits, into forums that don't?

 

[FallingPianos]

Agreed, but these are the most underutilized. The name will still relect all three topics.

such as "Miscellaneous"? I just worry that people will use the news forum instead.

 

[Stace]

Will moderators continue shifting threads from forums that get lots of visits, into forums that don't?

Threads get shifted when they are started in the wrong category, when they are archived, when they get a little too heated and need to be moved to the Basement, or, in the case of *Breaking News* and Polls, when they've been there awhile and are no longer considered to be a hot topic. If users utilize the option to subscribe to threads they've posted in, or manually subscribe to a thread that interests them but they've yet to make a post in, they can still find those threads by using their User CP. Shifting threads also makes it easier for folks to find threads related to specific topics that they are interested in....hence why we have so many different categories. Some folks come here to debate specific topics and don't usually stray to the other forums...keeping the threads within specific categories helps folks find what they're interested in relatively quickly.

 

[Jay R]

I'm personally interested in developing the European forum so please don't close or merge it just yet, we're getting more Europeans registering and I hope it can become more dynamic. The Middle East forum is very popular and due to its subject matter requires it's own forum. But Asia Pacific and Asia Central could be merged into a single Asian forum. Africa's pretty dead too, and to my knowledge Medussa's the only African member, she's been excellent on the 'SA After Apartheid thread' but that's the only activity in the whole forum. I don't know what you could do with it though.

 

[Schweddy]

I'm personally interested in developing the European forum so please don't close or merge it just yet, we're getting more Europeans registering and I hope it can become more dynamic.

Awesome! If you have any ideas for more International forums - let me know. i.e. Do we believe there is enough interest to sustain a UN forum or International Political parties forum?

The Middle East forum is very popular and due to its subject matter requires it's own forum. But Asia Pacific and Asia Central could be merged into a single Asian forum. Africa's pretty dead too, and to my knowledge Medussa's the only African member, she's been excellent on the 'SA After Apartheid thread' but that's the only activity in the whole forum. I don't know what you could do with it though.

For now, would like to keep a breakout in the International forums. It has been suggested that we could be more specific within those areas - thoughts?

I just alphabetized several areas - wow!! I think this will make a huge impact. I've decided *not* to merge the topical ones mentioned above. The poll indicates that more folks like the topic defined forums. I did merge "political platforms" and "partisan politics" however. Let's run with this for awhile and see if this natually creates more activity in our unused topical forums. :mrgreen: