Merging Forums?

[MrWu]

New poster here but long time reader.

I feel like a lot of threads/ideas/comments are all over the place and hidden in little nooks and crannies and a lot of times, a thread dies within hours of its creation even very interesting threads that should have gotten more comments considering this is a Nintendo oriented blog. Even the comment threads on news on your front page dies pretty quickly, and as I read your forum/site late at night, I find that by the time I get to an interesting thread, the discussion has moved on.

The idea is to put all the gaming discussion into one forum. No more subforums for Wii/3DS/WiiU/ or Nintendo/Sony/MS and the blog threads will also be included, so people can discuss breaking news as they happen and talk on the side about other issues including Sony or Microsoft items all in the same spot. It seems like doing that would mix posters up and keep more eyeballs on threads.

The adult forum and off topic forums can be kept separate.

I'm sure this has been suggested before, but have you guys given this a thought?

[cortjezter]

It definitely has, and we definitely have.

The history goes like this: on the first day, RMC created the forums. It was very simple, about three forum sections total. People wanted more organisation because things were cluttered and difficult to keep track of. Plus, a few forums with a lot of activity tends to push lots of things down the page and be lost anyway. If the blog threads were all combined into one forum with everything else, it would be total chaos, since there are usually over 125 new ones per day, that would push all other discussions down at least 3 full pages per day; I don't know if that would solve more problems than it creates for most people's forum-going needs.

The "second day", we beefed things up quite a bit, as suggested by community members. It had everything broken down into tons of forum sections. People seemed fine for awhile with that, but after awhile, people wanted something simpler.

So the "third day", we scaled things back, reducing and combining forums as intuitively as we could, which is roughly where it is today, give or take a few tweaks along the way. Yet some people still suggest we go back to having more, and others suggest less.

The bottom line is that no matter which extreme we go to, more than a few people will want it the other way. We have it kind of in the middle now, and most people seem to get along with it just fine. I don't personally think the overall structure of forums make a strong impact in activity, but a little bit of order seems to go a long way.

[Mako]

While it is a good suggestion, I think using "view active topics", "view your posts", etc. eliminates any confusion caused by all the different sub forums. No thread is going to get lost or hidden anywhere, because using "view active topics" will let you see all of them in one place. If you think something is an interesting topic and it isn't active, you can still post in it. Just make sure you are adding something meaningful to the discussion already at hand.

This gets a little bit tricky with the blog posts, because there are so many of them. RMC usually averages just under 90 blog posts a day (robometal cowboy's average), so keeping tack of all of them can be a lot harder. What you can do is go under "Blog Story Discussion" and sort the posts by "replies" or "views" over a certain period of time. Usually lets you see which stories are the most important. Post in the ones that interest you and check back in "View my posts" to see if there are new posts in the same thread or not. I realize this doesn't stop the story from getting washed away with all the other stories RMC posts, but if the story is interesting enough it will live on for some time.

[kartmaster]

While it is a good suggestion, I think using "view active topics", "view your posts", etc. eliminates any confusion caused by all the different sub forums. No thread is going to get lost or hidden anywhere, because using "view active topics" will let you see all of them in one place. If you think something is an interesting topic and it isn't active, you can still post in it. Just make sure you are adding something meaningful to the discussion already at hand.

Yup, certainly the best way to do it.