Forum Update and Reorg

A [-]week[/-] month is a reasonable amount of time to wait before following up on this.

Unless half the staff is on vacation at once.

^My bad, meant to say a month. This discussion has been going on for about a month now. This thread was started three weeks ago and was a continuation of another thread started over a month ago.

Strangely enough, I do have real-life crap to deal with.

LIES!!!

Might as well reduce the board to one forum.

People barely move from the Red Room as it is. If you can discuss anything there all the time, what's the point of other forums at all.

You might as well just have Moderated and Unmoderated and toss everything else.

People complain the other forums are dead...it's because they are too lazy to post anywhere but one forum!

Well, I'm sure that insulting the board membership is a very good way to deal with the question that has been raised...

I am now in favor of making all these changes.

For now.

How else to word it?

People generally hardly ever leave the Red Room and then complain about a lack of traffic elsewhere.

Is juggling forums going to suddenly make people visit the other rooms when they won't now? Especially if the Red Room becomes a place where no one's threads are ever moved regardless of topic?

Is there a point to having other forums if that ends up being policy?

Why do you want to force people to post in the other forums?

Why NOT allow posters the freedom to post their thread in the forum and moderation level they choose?

If the answer is b/c the other forums exist and so should be used, I will ask, why do they need to exist?

I think what Tamar is trying to find out is why, when the majority of the posting is done in RR, do certain folks get their knickers in a knot when they don't see other forums in use? I can see that some folks who are in other forums might want to get similar (but less derogatory in nature) discussions going and can't because those folks won't leave the RR. And some won't leave the RR because they know they have certain behaviors that would get them warned and maybe even banned.
Tamar isn't wanting to force anyone to post anywhere. She's explaining why the reorganization will not change anything that is going on here

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" should be playing in the background of this post.

Zombie Muad Dib disagrees!

B/c having one active forum, 3 semi active, half a dozen dead forums and 4 admin forums make this place look dead and boring. I would like for more people to post and part of that is to create a positive first impression. Thus why I would like to see the software updated, the forums consolidated, and the front page cleaned up.

Now when it has been done in other places, forum consolidation has had the benefit of boosting overall posting in those forums. With fewer forums, people are more likely to go in them, and with a broader range of topics people are more likely to be exposed to a thread that they normally wouldn't see.

While I personally prefer Async's idea of just dividing the forums up by posting style instead of topics, there are other ways to go about it. However with any of them I think allowing threads to stay in the RR WITHOUT having to anchor them with gratuitous insults and invective is a good policy change.

That $20 should have bought at least.... 3 weeks of support.

I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

Then there is no point to any change but a complete overhaul to forums by posting style.

No one is going to post anywhere else again if everything is allowed in the Red Room. Every other forum will just become deader if we do that.

Decommision the Green Room. It is obsolete.

Again, if no one wants to post in them then why are they needed in the first place?

But I think you are being a bit rediculus, people will still post outside the RR, especially if you create an active, vibrant atmosphere in the non RR forums. I think I've been pretty clear on how I think that could be accomplished.

All I am saying is that posters should have the CHOICE of where to put their thread. Why is that a bad thing?

I have just skimmed through this thread for the general feel of it. I have not read every signle word so forgive me if this has been covered, but what is the overall purpose of reorganisation?

If this is about attracting new people then I don't think a forum reorganisation will have any effect on that whatsoever.

Have those other boards had a low-moderated, practically anything-goes forum?
Most other places I've peeked at had a place to discuss politics, religion, sex and everything else, but it was moderated. No flaming allowed.
There are folks here who want to debate without having a censor on their fingers. That's not gonna change.
Perhaps you should invite folks that you know hate that kind of style over and tell them stay out of the red room and start those discussions with them in the green room and other places. Maybe then some of the "old codgers" will come and join you. (provided they can find the the censor adapter for their keyboards)

Allow me to again express my thoughts on the matter.....

First impression to whom exactly?

This board is hardly know outside of it's membership, with brief mentions on TK or Trekbbs the most publicity it gets. It has no anchor per se, whereas most forums do have an anchor, whether it be a sports teams, genre show, dating, medical conditions, whatever. Almost all other boards that are busy have a draw. WF has no such draw.

So, I think what you are missing is a way for people to happen across the site. To get the word out there about what it is and why people might like to come. It's like having a good restaurant in the middle of the countryside. You can have the best chef, best kitchen and the nicest furniture, but there is no street for people to walk off of, so the only way to get people in is by word of mouth or advertising - at least to start with anyhow.

Find a way to let people know about the site and then worry about what they see when they get here. Until then it's just energy down the drain. This point has already been proven in the past, such as when Borgs contructed a portal and tried to put bells and whistles on the site to attract more people. There was no traffic so nobody was stopping by and seeing it so the effort was pointless.

Every year there is a "WF is dying" debate. The usual cronies come in and say that it's not. But it is, and it has been for ages. It has just been a slow, dragged out death rather than an overnight one. For every new or returning member per year, between 2-5 leave. At that rate the board cannot go on forever. We can already see now that it is quieter, even for the regulars, as less people debate, threads get bumped less frequently and the voices commenting ona topic are less than they were 5, 6, maybe 7 years ago.

People have accused you, in seems, of trying to put your stamp onto WF. Well, if you are, I say who cares? WF will have to augment itself if it is to survive and get new people. That may mean reorganisation, it may also mean a change in rules. Whether WF regulars like it the way it is, the fact is that the thing they like is waning and they should accept this. Some people need to excercise some common sense and realise that most of the regulars here are in a minority where the public are concerned and a lot of people are turned off by debate once it degenerates into insults and personal attacks - and when I say turned off I don't just mean offended, some simply find it tedious.

Basically, it's head out of our arses time. The board's members need to face up to some uncomfortable truths and we have to find a way to get more traffic here, irrespective of whether there is to be reorganisation or the board is to survive even in it's current form.

Let's become a dating site! Not just any dating site, but one that caters to the nerds, the geeks, the mentally ill, the disabled, the homos, the militant atheists, the overweight, etc.

Think about how many people will come, desperate to find love!

I could see maybe merging Media Central into the Green Room. The Green Room seems like basically the office water cooler of Wordforge -- light chat, nothing all that controversial, nothing all that personal -- and talking about TV and music fits that description pretty well.

The nice thing about the way the Knowledge section is set up right now is that many of the subjects are things that most people are either very interested in or not interested in at all. So any given person might have a few forums they go into every day and a few that they never bother with, and they're guaranteed to find something they want to read in the former.

One thing that might help -- or it might make the front page cluttered beyond belief -- is a way of listing more threads under each room. I've gone into rooms that I don't normally go into because I saw a thread that interested me off to the side of the homepage. But there's only one thread per forum, and the thread title is pretty truncated.

Here's another thought: An increasing trend in news website design is toward recognizing that people are less and less likely to enter through the homepage, and thus toward building more navigation and more content teasers into the design of story pages. What if each forum and thread page had a sidebar listing the five most recently updated threads on the board? Or even, ideally -- since most of the time they'll be Red Room threads -- the five most recently updated threads in every room but the one you're in currently?

I imagine if vBulletin is built to support advertising, it probably has optional slots that could be repurposed that way ... the downside is that it would take away from the simplicity of the design.

Where are the new people coming from?

One idea is to allow people to use Facebook Credentials to set up a WF account. Basically by using your Facebook account to prove you are a real person you bypass the Spambot waiting list (which usually takes a couple days and sometimes an email to admin to get approved) and can have a very quick and easy signup. People could then post links to interesting threads in their Facebook and tell their friends to join in.

Won't that compromise the "secret indentity" rules that have always been so strict here?

Don't get me wrong, if it generates traffic then it seems like a plan to me, but there seems to be that one sticking point.

What other ways to generate traffic do you think there could be?