sub-forums - Suggestions - Forums : Best Ever Albums

Fergenaprido

Gender: Male
Location: GTA

Romanelli wrote:

Just my two cents...you're talking about splitting the Music forum into 6 new areas. I think that one of the appealing things about a message board is the ease of useage, especially for new users. You are asking people to make decisions before even posting a single word: where does this go? I don't think that many topics are going to be as simple for people to know where they go as you might think.

Users right now have everything music related in one forum. It's all easy to find and easy to navigate. 6 sub-forums will get frustrating, and frustrating leads to giving up. Let's say you are a new user, and you post something in the wrong forum. You come back to check on it, and it's gone because it's been moved to the correct place. People are going to find that frustrating.

Also, with six subforums, the music board will suddenly look like it has a lot less traffic on it than it does. People who are not regulars tend to post more on boards that at least appear to have a lot of traffic. Six subforums will LOOK like there isn't a lot going on.

Back to ease of useage...you have a simple system going here. I think it would be better to keep it as is rather than complicate things for the sake of organization. Yes, organization is MEANT to uncomplicate things...but it doesn't always work that way. The music forum doesn't fill up in an hour or even 2 hours. It's not so huge that you have to split it up six different ways in order to be able to be aware of all of the content.

I say keep it as is...for now. I don't think it's so big as to warrant an overhaul yet.

I think if new members are not sure where to post, they can just post in general, and if need be the moderators can move it to the appropriate subforum (and notify the original poster, perhaps). As with any system, it will take some getting used to, but I think the subforum divisions are intuitive, and should be easy enough for new members to grasp.

I believe albummaster also said previously that users will be able to view either the subforums individually, or all of the Music forum posts in one list. I don't know how that works, but I think that could be set as the default option, so that it will still show that a lot is happening in the forums, and users that wish to filter to the subforums can elect to do so.

Maybe we are logging in on different times, but I have seen the music forum fill up over the course of two hours. Besides, I don't spend all day on here, and I suppose most users don't either, and if we're gone for 6, 12, or even 24 hours, a thread we had posted to could now be on the second or third page, which can make it difficult to spot. Even if things are not as busy as they seem, I think it is still better to prepare for an influx of users, threads, and posts, instead of waiting until it happens and then trying to react to it.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Romanelli wrote:

Let's say you are a new user, and you post something in the wrong forum. You come back to check on it, and it's gone because it's been moved to the correct place. People are going to find that frustrating.

Also, with six subforums, the music board will suddenly look like it has a lot less traffic on it than it does. People who are not regulars tend to post more on boards that at least appear to have a lot of traffic. Six subforums will LOOK like there isn't a lot going on.

I say keep it as is...for now. I don't think it's so big as to warrant an overhaul yet.

I just think it's quite difficult to find things at the moment and the forums might be easier to browse if there were specialised areas for certain topics. I'd feel a bit funny about doing nothing to address the issues that purple raised the other day. The only things left on the table are to show related posts at the point of starting a new topic, and to improve the forum search.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Fergenaprido wrote:

I think if new members are not sure where to post, they can just post in general, and if need be the moderators can move it to the appropriate subforum (and notify the original poster, perhaps). As with any system, it will take some getting used to, but I think the subforum divisions are intuitive, and should be easy enough for new members to grasp.

I believe albummaster also said previously that users will be able to view either the subforums individually, or all of the Music forum posts in one list. I don't know how that works, but I think that could be set as the default option, so that it will still show that a lot is happening in the forums, and users that wish to filter to the subforums can elect to do so.

Maybe we are logging in on different times, but I have seen the music forum fill up over the course of two hours. Besides, I don't spend all day on here, and I suppose most users don't either, and if we're gone for 6, 12, or even 24 hours, a thread we had posted to could now be on the second or third page, which can make it difficult to spot. Even if things are not as busy as they seem, I think it is still better to prepare for an influx of users, threads, and posts, instead of waiting until it happens and then trying to react to it.

I'm not totally sure how the mechanism will work, but I agree with the above. There is a concern over usability, but it shouldn't be rocket-science for most people. The only issue I can see is if there is a topic that spans two or more subforum categories (which might be a reason to use tagging instead), but I think that's the type of thing that can tweaked as we go along.