The decision to split forums into several sections should only happen when there are way too many threads to keep track of, and we are nowhere near that now. Any subscriber can simply view the unread threads, nothing gets “thrown under the bus.” Keep in mind that splitting the forums into sections results in fewer views for each item, more clicking around to see all the new posts, people skipping important threads because they don’t figure X thread will be in Y subsection, and most of all anyone who’s spent much time here knows that a discussion of rent controls can quickly morph into a titanic debate about nukes and geopolitics. This will be even more the case when we have proper comment tree-threading like reddit or even Daily Paul have now (but please retain the ability to post media inline!). The newbie figures he’s only interested in political theory, so he never even looks at the economics or history subsections. I’ve seen many forums needlessly diluted by this splitting up into sections. You can always allow the user to see any type of posts they want to filter for, but the default initial presentation has got to show all threads, at least until these forums grow to two or three times their current size. Tree-threading should help reduce the number of top-level threads as well.
Agreed.
Agreed. Reddit is not a forum. If this were replaced with a Reddit, I think the format of conversation would noticeably change. And you’d probably see a noticeable amount of attrition…which would probably include myself.
cporter:
The real key is to focus less on complete integration and more on traditional user interfaces and features that make that particular site section sell. Integration is a nice bonus and a convenience to the users, but nobody will use super-integrated forums when they can’t tell if they are looking at a forum or a blog. There are far too many “forums” and “wikis” out there that are just WordPress posts hacked up by an amateur UI designer.
Bingo. I think this is exactly what Tucker got wrong.
…although I do agree a better search tool would be helpful. Look at what I’m working with here.
