Does The Spot have too many subforums? Questions about tsn, life, or anything else you would like Neo to answer. He's got the answers, but not necessarily the *right* one.

[Anonymous]

As it stands, The Spot has 26 subforums (not including The Attic). It seems to me that the number of forums is keeping any one subforum from having a large level of discussion.
Here's a comparison
The Something Awful forums have only 20 subforums (Not including the two locked forums and the forum with the list of banned posters) but over 33,000 accounts (this probably translates to only 10,000 active accounts and only 5,000 are on at any one time).
Now compare that to The Spot which has 26 subforums and only 117 members.
It seems like maybe some of these forums should be combined (for example the Games Review forum usually degenerates into game discussion rather than reviews)? SA took two years before it spilt up into more than, I believe, five basic forums (GBS, FYAD, Awful Link of the Day, Serious Hardware/Software Crap, and some other one I forgot the name of).

Now don't get me wrong as I really enjoy the forums, but it seems like the number of subforums is a bit excessive for such a small community. Maybe a smaller number of subforums would encourage more discussion in one or the other and the forum can be split up as the community grows (or if there seem to be too many of a certain type of post in one forum or another).

Edited because I have no concept of time and put the SA split later than it occured

[Neo]

I appreciate your input on this, and I have been contemplating it for tsnIV.

I agree, there are too many forums in our index, and with tsnIV, I will be combining and removing a good number of them...as well as creating a couple new ones to replace old ones.

The reason for so many forums was because of the different things that were talked about. Some of them just didn't fit the forum they were in (i.e. just for fun, kickback cafe)...some of the forums were to test how well that subject matter would go over (i.e. shopper's almanac, game reviews)...and some of them are features of the site (i.e. journals, rants).

I will have a completed list of the new forum index when I decide which ones to keep or combine or delete.

But another thought for tsnIV was the new phpbb boards they are working on which let you have forums indexes inside of a forum...for example, in a WZUP Radio forum:

WZUP Radio
- Playlist Requests
- Music News
- Music Reviews
- Comments, Suggestions, Questions

It would create the illusion of fewer forums, but would keep things more organized, instead of having all the threads in one spot. Organization is the reason for so many forums...but in the end the organization became disorganized, and I wanted to let you know that I AM working on reordering and reorganizing the index still.

[El Gato en el Sombrero]

I would like to know why my post was deleted.

[Neo]

Well, it doesn't require an explanation, but I will because you're relatively new.

Your post had nothing to do with this thread, and was supposed to be deleted before everyone else posted to it. I just forgot once I made my post. But I deleted it, along with all the other ones that were talking about it, because none of it had to do with Subforums.