Todays moan and gripe is about the large number of sub-forums, especially empty forums, we have laying about here.

As things stand the RPG section fo the forums (which is the worse but not alone in this matter) has a sub forum for all the different games we play, plus the base forum for everything else. Well msot of thee forums are empty, and the rest are nearly empty. The problem is that each game we run only takes up a single (if long) forum thread, and there is simply no need for at times each thread to have its own forum.

So the first point is tidying up, its messy and takes longer to navigate, but the other problem is visibilty. Often, especially late in the year, people will only be checknig the forum of the games they play, ignoring the threads and hence entire subforums of games they do no, missing entirely any new games starting up. People also entirely neglect to view the main RPG forum, missing anything that doesn't fit into one of the sub-forums.

So, lets get rid of all the RPG sub-forums and throw them all into one forums. Threads will be kept updated and stay on the front page, new games will stand out when everyone checks the single forum, evel quote threads should probably go in there though we may even consider just having a single massive quotes thread from all the games stickied at the top.

And while we're on the subject, lets clean up some of the other forums, the entire discussion section of forums, sad and neglected at the bottom of the index, can probably all be rolled into the cantina, evenet and shinanigans should at the least be a subforum of this if not rolled into it with stickies at the top, suggestions and the welcom forums, probably the website posts as well, should also be subforums of the cantina.

While I'm busy with my hacksaw cutting away at the forums, I'm also looking for an excuse to roll board games and other games in together, possibly with computer games (though this would probably be renames to board, computer and other games) just to keep down on forums.

So in conclusion, cut down on the number of forums. The less places people have to check the more threads they will see and the more active the forums will be, if there were a few thousand people in the society, the boards were full of topics and we were struggling to see everything posted in the last day then we would start to make subforums, but as things stand we'd probably get more actvity by concentrating it into a smaller number of forums.

tl;dr give me admin powers

Generally speaking, I agree with Sean. The subforums make everything much clearer and easier to find imo. I agree that having seperate 'Pit' and 'Cantina' forums is a little pointless though, especially given all the random things we tend to talk about in bars!

If you only want to follow one thread on the forum then it's better done with the watch function then giving every thread its own forum, the point of only checking the forum when your thread is updated is somewhat moot when you have more than one game in a section anyway. The idea of combining everything is to make looking at all of the threads much much much easier then it is now, while helping to advertise new games and making checking a single threat only marginally more difficult of at all.

And Rhi, my brain is not a sieve, my point is not about empty sub-forums, it's about lots of small sub forums that could be amalgamated into one, especially for the purpose of advertising when a new game starts up. A new thread with a date on it, sitting at the top of a forum is much more noticeable then an extra line in a list that wasn't there yesterday, not to mention when a game you don't bother to follow already has its own sub-forum the only sign there is a new one in the same system starting is the thread count increasing by one, easy to miss.

My thought would be that if quotes were amalgamated into one thread then it would be prudent to mention which game you were posting quotes for at the start of your post, but if that's a bad idea then scrap it.

Lastly this was a simple suggestion, my apologies if as a scientist I insisted on adding my reasons and a full explanation behind my suggestion made it much longer. And on the subject of the joke I put at the end (tl;dr standing for too long didn't read, ie intended as a summary, and my summary having nothing to do with the suggestion) I shall abstain from putting a massive sign around it or removing it, I was in a much lighter mood when I wrote my suggestion than I am now and I'm not sure if I can pull of humor. I'll probably skip on the drinks tonight and may un-cancel the other appointment I had cancelled so I could attend film night tomorrow.

Tom W said:

I know there are too many forums, it's on my to do list to discuss which to snip with Alex. Don't worry it'll get done.

Welp, redundant suggestion is redundant, never mind.