Increase traffic by decreasing subforums?

[wineandgolover]

I'm sure this idea has been brought up before, but just in case it hasn't...

I suspect that if the number of subforums was drastically cut and most go conversation was steered to a single forum, both traffic and post-quality would increase.

It makes sense to keep a few things separate, I guess. Certainly commercial posts should be a different section. I was thinking Malkovich, too, but I'm not even certain of that.

If there was a primary forum to browse, it would be easy to ignore threads that didn't interest the reader, while not have to click through multiple subs to find one that does. Yes, I know that much of this functionality exists with the "View Unread Posts" feature, but I suspect only hard-core users take advantage of this capability, leaving the casual visiter somewhat bewildered.

Example - Go book reviews is a ghost town. It's probably not visited all that often. But if book reviews showed up in the main forum, they'd likely get more attention, which would encourage folks to write more.

I'd suggest just a few forums:

*Go Chat - 90% of traffic

*Off-Topic (give it a better name like "The Asylum" or "Tenuki" or something) - for no-go stuff. This sub is quite popular on other fora I frequent. It seems to make the bulletin board a place to hang-out.

*Computer Go - the one area that might get traffic that I suspect would bore most forum members to tears.

*Malkovich - for all Malkovich activity. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing this in go chat, too, but I could see why others might object.

*Trading Post - for commercial posts, and to facilitate users selling to users

*Go Clubs (all posts start with club name) - one sub to combine all the current club subs.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. Have a great day.

[emeraldemon]

For what it's worth, I browse almost exclusively by the "View unread posts" button, so the subforums have no affect on me. I see everything

[jts]

Yes, I think the consensus is that all registered users use unread posts, and I know that before I registered, I used "View new posts".

I don't think it's impossible that fewer forums would make L19 more appealing to the technologically unsavvy, but it would make it much, much harder to find older posts. The need to find ways to find and index old posts is a big, separate issue that I was considering posting on, but I really don't have anything intelligent to suggest... other than maybe, we should all work harder at migrating interesting discussions to SL so that we don't need to find them on L19. The "likes" used to work decently as an index to the best posts, but there are just way too many posts now for that to be helpful.

Glancing at our board index, I'm actually surprised by how active all the sub-forums are. Except for the variant Malkovitch sub-forums, they all have posts from 2013, which is quite good - I was expecting about half would, half wouldn't.

[badukJr]

I agree, there are forums with thousands of users that don't have so many subforums.
Some of the subforums have topics without a post for years still on the first page.

I think combining most of them and having graphical tags applied to each topic would be much better.
For example: combining all of the server subforums into a go-server subforum and having a small graphic for each topic that says 'KGS' or 'IGS' or whatever.

This comes with the benefit of juts adding new tags for new servers/clubs instead of adding a whole subforum.

[speedchase]

I like it the way it is. It makes it easy to tell what you are going to get.

[tchan001]

we should all work harder at migrating interesting discussions to SL so that we don't need to find them on L19.

That is not a good idea unless it is your own posts. People like JF who have posted interesting information for the readers of L19 have not given permission for further dissemination of their writings. And IIRC the SL copyright license is quite different from that of this forum.

[jts]

we should all work harder at migrating interesting discussions to SL so that we don't need to find them on L19.

That is not a good idea unless it is your own posts. People like JF who have posted interesting information for the readers of L19 have not given permission for further dissemination of their writings. And IIRC the SL copyright license is quite different from that of this forum.

Does this forum.... have a copyright policy? Is everything we write here (c) Jordus?

[Dusk Eagle]

No, you maintain copyright of your posts. You never clicked away anything when you registered. On SL however, there is a license under which all content is published, which is AFAIK the modus operandi for wikis.

[tj86430]

For what it's worth, I browse almost exclusively by the "View unread posts" button, so the subforums have no affect on me. I see everything

Same here. That's the way I use all forums I follow actively.

[wineandgolover]

For what it's worth, I browse almost exclusively by the "View unread posts" button, so the subforums have no affect on me. I see everything

I understand. I am sure the majority of experienced posters use this approach. I guess the question is whether the goal is to maintain the site for current users or to grow and add more insightful users and useful content. If the latter, then I'd suggest making access easy and painless for noobs less BB-savvy than you.

KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) is a pretty good design concept, in general.

That said, I won't stop participating no matter how the forum is structured. Just thought I'd throw out an alternative. Maybe the fact that this post received 160 views in a day proves me wrong, anyway. (Is that a lot?)

I am most gratified that not one response was along the lines of "Why is this dude with twenty posts in two and half years trying to tell us how to run our board?" Y'all are a polite lot, anyway.

[Alguien]

For what it's worth, I browse almost exclusively by the "View unread posts" button, so the subforums have no affect on me. I see everything

I only read "view unread posts" too.

[skydyr]

For what it's worth, I browse almost exclusively by the "View unread posts" button, so the subforums have no affect on me. I see everything

I only read "view unread posts" too.

I do this as well, but I think in the long run it makes it more likely that I respond to existing topics rather than create new ones.

[ez4u]

For what it's worth, I browse almost exclusively by the "View unread posts" button, so the subforums have no affect on me. I see everything

I only read "view unread posts" too.

I do this as well, but I think in the long run it makes it more likely that I respond to existing topics rather than create new ones.

Attaboy! That's why we call them 'discussions'. Imagine all we did was create new topics.

[skydyr]

I only read "view unread posts" too.

I do this as well, but I think in the long run it makes it more likely that I respond to existing topics rather than create new ones.

Attaboy! That's why we call them 'discussions'. Imagine all we did was create new topics.

Well, there's a balance to be found. If everyone just replied to topics and no one created new ones, where would we be?

[speedchase]

Well, there's a balance to be found. If everyone just replied to topics and no one created new ones, where would we be?

We'd have ten page discussions about stupid things like... never mind