Not a fan of burying the niche forums in the huge media lounge forum. It will be almost impossible to find threads on boardgames and technology now. How does it help the site to do this? Is it easier to administer? Because from your customers' perspective, I can't see how this helps. I could, of course, be wrong.
Forum Consolidation
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
Go to the forum's page, scroll to the bottom.
In the Display Options box, there is a drop-down for "Prefix". Choose the desired prefix.
Click "Show threads".
Historically, recombining forums has been a way to increase the visibility of low-traffic topics.
Whenever someone posts to one of these threads, it will be bumped to the top of the forum, meaning more eyes that weren't actively looking for it will see it, and some of those folks will consider posting to them. The hope is that we'll see more discussion, rather than less.
Putting discussion of a particular topic off in its own little corner tends to limit discussion to only the die-hard, dedicated people who seek it out. Those people will still be able to find the threads now, thanks to the sorting feature, but now you'll probably also see some activity from others, and that's a good thing.
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The media lounge forum was a long, long way from being huge. It had threads which hadn't been posted in since August 2010 just on the front page. Some of the others went back even further; art went back to early 2010 - it was practically dead.
The aim is to have a smaller number of active forums rather than dozens of almost dead forums. It is, as you say, a PITA to administer a large forum list; micro-forums for every conceivable subject just confuses people (there are many people who weren't even aware of the existence of those forums - the list was too long).
What we now have is a forum whose threads on the first page go back a few days, which is about where we want to be with an active forum.
Just click on a thread icon. It'll sort you your own "virtual forum" with just boardgames or technology, making them very easy to find. Once we start doing it, I guarantee you'll find it a much better way of sorting threads on subjects as niche and micro as you like, without having to have dead forums littering the boards.
Just to prove it - click here: all board games threads!
You can even bookmark those "virtual forums"; and I might consider a way for you to store your list of desired subjects as a favourite, making the forum structure almost obsolete - you'll be defining your very own personal forum list.
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Holy Bovine
First Post
I really wish the piazo boards would take this advice to heart. Navigating their boards is annoying beyond belief due to the massive number of sub-forums.
Love the re-alignment especially...
Being able to do this!!!!! I was only lukewarm on the whole thread icon thing but this is beautiful! Thanks Morrus!
This really is the selling point of the icons. You can now have your virtual forums of subjects that we'd never consider opening a forum for. For example, if you're an OD&D fan, you might sometimes wish there were an OD&D forum so you could see all the OD&D threads. We'd never open one, because there simply aren't enough threads to warrant it - but now you can just use the OD&D thread icon and there's your own virtual forum!
Holy Bovine
First Post
Heck it is even easier than that - just click the thread icon of any post and you get a listing of posts only with that thread icon!
jonesy
A Wicked Kendragon
Ok, I'm probably being really obtuse here, but, is there a way to browse all of the icons from the same page so you could pick which prefix you want to view? Or even see what all of them are? The thread view below the boards only seems to pick the threads for that particular board.
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