Too many forums?

S. Traaken · Unread post by **S. Traaken** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 12:07 pm

There's a lot of forums here, which on a site with the relatively small active userbase* here can make things look big and empty (even though usage seems to have picked up in recent times).

My experience is that starting with only a small number of forums is good, branching to more as is needed. Does there really need to be 2 LAN forums? There's only a handful of threads, and there will probably only ever be a couple of active ones.

There's 13 forums under Netspace - with the amount of use they get, two would probably be sufficient. Many of the forums could be merged or removed without leaving any kind of confusion with regards to what should be posted where.

My suggestion is that some of these are merged - it also tends to make the site look more used and encourage people to post.

* While there's 163 registered users, 84 have never posted and of the remaining 79, 47 have posted 5 times or less, leaving us with an active userbase around 32.

Anach · Unread post by **Anach** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 3:03 pm

What forums would suggest we do without?

I have done it this way, as it makes it easy to know which forum to post under, and also makes sure everyone is catered for.

Once moved to the new host, things will speed up and hopefully some new members too.

Most of the netspace forums are hidden to the Non-Hub users.

S. Traaken · Unread post by **S. Traaken** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 3:42 pm

Anach wrote:What forums would suggest we do without?

Off Topic, Automotive, Flame and Spam, merged into General Discussion.

Hardware, Networking, Software merged to become a general Computing forum.

Online Gaming, General LAN Gaming and -{BOSS}- LAN merged as Gaming and LANs.

Merge all of the NS P2P forums into one.

Most of the remaining NS forums could be merged appropriately - they serve the same purpose and there's only one that has any bulk of traffic.

I have done it this way, as it makes it easy to know which forum to post under, and also makes sure everyone is catered for.

A reduced number of forums shouldn't make it any harder. Experience indicates that if people can't find an appropriate forum, they'll post anyway - if you get too many of these, then it's easy to create another forum to fill the demand. General discussion catches anything that doesn't fit anyway.

Anach · Unread post by **Anach** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 4:03 pm

The thing is, i was actually thinking of merging some forums the other day, and have done so now. Not quite the way you suggested, but still cleaned up a little.

TopDog · Unread post by **TopDog** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 5:15 pm

this dood obviously has some banwidth issues.

S. Traaken · Unread post by **S. Traaken** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 5:24 pm

TopDog wrote:this dood obviously has some banwidth issues.

Number of forums has nothing to do with bandwidth.

TopDog · Unread post by **TopDog** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 10:03 pm

you were just complaing about how "that long pages will often timeout before loading fully" in you other thread.

S. Traaken · Unread post by **S. Traaken** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 11:03 pm

Then why didn't you reply in that thread? I'm confused.

Part of the problem is that I tend to open all threads that I'm going to read in different tabs (using mozilla) so they all load while I'm reading another thread. With the limited server bandwidth, it's very likely using this method that I'll get a php timeout on some of the longer pages. As suggested by Anach, this will likely be solved with future server movements.

Squidley · Unread post by **Squidley** » Sat Feb 07, 2004 11:01 pm

some of the crap should be cilled from the replies of old topics though.

a fair bit seem like people are just trying to boost their reply numbers.

ps. this post will self-destruct in 30 days

Psycho · Unread post by **Psycho** » Mon Feb 09, 2004 12:21 am

I actually like it the way the way it is.

Being a forum slart, I can open the main forum page and see at a glance which forums have new responses. Then I can open them all up at once (as mentioned) or keep the main page and visit each forum sequentially.

That said, I've seen the idea mentioned on other sites, and it also works well. If you want it, do it.

Bandwidth: I"ve never noticed any problems, bar post-midnight sometimes. Sometimes Anach's connection is a little stressed during off-peak time, wonder why?

Too many forums?

Who would like to see the forums merged as listed below?