The Workshop?

How about expanding the scope of Camp Wordforge? The room could use the extra traffic.

And don't we already have a Workshop?

Yes, the Workshop is where the artistic types show off their efforts.

Camp Homeforge.

Home Depot?

Or, as I call it, Home Despot.

If we bring back the Gold Room, some fucker will demand the Iron Room.

Oh wait, stroke of brilliance! Frontline's idea of calling it the workshop would cover fitness, too. We workout, work on cars, etc. at the Workshop. I don't see any problem with this idea, not like anybody has claimed the label yet.

Their main competitor is...Slowe's.

Think of writing as a...workout...for your brain.

I'd be for just bringing back the Gold Room. There are a lot of smart people here with great experience to share, and the Gold Room was a treasure trove of cool info.

What's wrong with expanding Camp Wordforge to take on that role. Mburton's thread seems to be doing fine.

I don't see the point of creating more little used/read forums when we already have some.

@frontline:

This raises some questions. Would you like to see more traffic in Campforge? What do you suggest might attract more people without expanding the theme?

Personally, I think threads about bamboo floors and other home improvement projects would fit well in the Green Room, as it is meant to encompass miscellaneous topics discussed in a non-confrontational manner. I think Campforge has a somewhat unique purpose, one that is specifically not suited to the Green Room. That said, I'd still rather that niche forums get enough traffic to justify not being part of the general. Media Central and to a lesser extent Techforge succeed with that. I'd like to see Campforge do the same.

Why? How does mburtonk's thread hurt it?

Camp Wordforge hasn't had decent traffic for a couple years now. A rejuvenation could be in order.

Gun, Garden, Home and Auto, and everything in between.

So looking back, there have been about 20 threads in the past six months (and about twenty in the six months before that). Of the most recent 20, one quarter are non-gun/camping threads with two being home improvement, two being auto and one being garden. Maybe if we explicitely opened the thread up to those topics we'd get some more traffic through there.

Martha Stewart with guns?

Hot.

She may have picked up a thing or two about weapons during lock-up.

I think it's a mistake to focus too much on traffic numbers versus usefulness to the community.

If you're into hunting, fishing and camping, you'll hang out in Camp Wordforge whether it's high-traffic or not. And because it's its own forum, you'll always find stuff you're interested in.

Branding and organization are important. Stuff needs to be categorized and easy to find, especially things that some people are very interested in and others are not interested in at all. Throwing other random stuff into Camp Wordforge would make it less useful to the people who currently use it, and probably wouldn't have any particular upside.

If you want to look at it from an attracting-new-members standpoint, I personally am very unlikely to join a community for "general discussion." That's what people get hooked into later. They'll join if they find a high concentration of good discussions of something they're interested in.

Personally, I think lumping the rooms together a while back was a mistake. We have some good "brands" here and we shouldn't dilute them into a disorganized hodgepodge.

Activity breeds activity. Look how many posts have gone into the forum in the last two days. It'd been five days of nothing before then (and a week of nothing before that, then TWO weeks of nothing).

Innactive forums don't attract people, even if it's their niche.

Heck, Camp Wordforge doesn't need to exsist. It does because anti-gun people whined and cried over seeing pro-gun threads in the Red Room and mostly because Elwood wanted it and he was the owner at the time. Nothing happens in there that wouldn't easily fit into the Red and Green rooms.

I'm always for trying out new things and such but Ancalagon is right that there nothing appealing about a forum with 300 empty forums. It was better when we had thousands of posts per day here..spreading it out more didn't look dead.

If there is another forum added it should be new and interesting and something people would want to participate in. Right now the only membership desire for a new forum is for an adult entertainment forum.

Done with this or no?

Yes.