Proposing a new Forum Structure

Edman

Administrator
Staff member
As per Soushkin's and Cornellius' suggestions and my ideas, I'd like to propose the following new forum structure:

- Emulation Talk
--- General Emulation
--- Rom Hacking
--- Emulation News
--- Submit Emulation News
- Talk of the Town
--- General Chat
--- Tech Talk
--- Gaming / Console Talk
- Website Talk
--- Announcements
--- Questions / Suggestions
--- Internal Affairs
--- Archive

These changes include
- merging Diaries and Talk of the Town into General Chat. At the moment Diaries and Talk of the Town are virtually indistinguishable from one another anyway.
- merging political discussion with General Chat. Political discussion is virtually inactive, most threads are already general chat, and politics based threads rarely come more than one at a time anyway.
- adding a Gaming / Console chat forum
- re-arranging a few things


Other proposed changes include:
- Add Graphics, Music, Movies forums (under Talk of the Town)
- Splitting Emulation Talk into subforums about different systems


What do you think?
 
Other proposed changes include:
- Add Graphics, Music, Movies forums (under Talk of the Town)
- Splitting Emulation Talk into subforums about different systems

These both seem a bit excessive to me. Everything else looks good.
 
Almost every emulation site I've seen applied the two changes quoted as excessive. They can be excessive; it just depends on the activity of the forum.

I kind of like this site for standing out though, so my say is at least for now the emulation forum should be divided.
 
Although I do find the Graphics, Music and Movies forums that you proposed to be a bit overkill, I do like the idea of splitting the Emulation Talk forums into subgroups based on consoles.
 
I believe SwampGas once said the rule was that new boards were made based on demand. A lot of people wanting to sell things resulted in the Classifieds, and a lot of political topics resulted in the Backroom. While things may have changed since then, I for one think that this is a sensible way to go about things. Since we have very little use of the boards right now, I think new ones would just make the place look even more empty.

Let's just wait for a while and see which boards are used and what topics people decide to start in Talk of the Town. We can use those two factors to determine which new boards are needed and which old boards should be folded into others.
 
Well, this seems like a good idea. The other two things, like other people have said, seem a bit excessive though.
 
Don't fuck with the backroom, it's a tradition.

Also, how about adding an image board?


I'd agree with you on the image board if we made the content posted "emulation-related" only.

The backroom o_O? Sorry, I'm clueless.

And with that, I'm off to bed.
 
I'd agree with you on the image board if we made the content posted "emulation-related" only.

The backroom o_O? Sorry, I'm clueless.

And with that, I'm off to bed.

The backroom is the name that was given to ZMD's controversial discussion area. It was implemented to segregate political and religious topics that had a tendency to appear in TotT to the chagrin of the more PC members of ZMD. Similarly, Diaries was created to segregate "personal life" posts that some users felt were "whiny".

And just as an aside, "Talk of the Town" is General Chat. It was actually the "Off Topic" area of ZMD. If you've had some creep over the years, it's probably because the purpose of each forum has been forgotten or ignored.

I'd second lillymon's suggestion. There's probably not a need to expand the categories yet, and I certainly wouldn't contract the board hierarchy with the current relaunch unless you're willing to tolerate the problems that caused the initial creation of those boards. I mean, there's nothing sacred about the forum layout, but it's wasn't broken. It would be best to allow some time to reassess any demand-necessitated structure changes.
 
For the love of God, no image boards...

I think the boards should remain pretty much as-is for now. The Backroom seems to have kind of lost its relevancy recently, but otherwise, things look good to me.
 
I honestly think that image boards now-a-days are completely overused mainly due to 2chan/4chan's on going phenomenon, and well along with UBB Style of discussion boards they too have been overused but for the type of site this is it works best as is.

Secondly, I do believe that the smaller category setup works best for smaller forums but once we hit the magical number of 5,000 threads or ~11,000 posts you have to create sub-categories. Also something to definitely look at is to perform some sort of clean up unless you know as a fact that the said categories' threads are note worthy or have useful information worth archiving.

Third, Edman you should really look into using the sudo-cron feature in Vbulletin to clean up the inactive members here with zero posts on a regular basis. If you would like I can provide you the script needed to perform that if you don't have one or don't know how to create it. Now while over three thousand members may seem impressive at first glance to visitors at the same time it also shows how inactive your forum seems by the lack of posts the majority of your members have under the member-listing; that wont really scare away anyone who really would like to join the community but at the same time no one will be impressed by it and it creates a hassle for anyone who wishes to sign up only to find out their name is taken by an inactive member.

- Carlos
 
I believe SwampGas once said the rule was that new boards were made based on demand. A lot of people wanting to sell things resulted in the Classifieds, and a lot of political topics resulted in the Backroom. While things may have changed since then, I for one think that this is a sensible way to go about things. Since we have very little use of the boards right now, I think new ones would just make the place look even more empty.

Let's just wait for a while and see which boards are used and what topics people decide to start in Talk of the Town. We can use those two factors to determine which new boards are needed and which old boards should be folded into others.

These both seem a bit excessive to me. Everything else looks good.

I honestly think that image boards now-a-days are completely overused mainly due to 2chan/4chan's on going phenomenon, and well along with UBB Style of discussion boards they too have been overused but for the type of site this is it works best as is.

Secondly, I do believe that the smaller category setup works best for smaller forums but once we hit the magical number of 5,000 threads or ~11,000 posts you have to create sub-categories. Also something to definitely look at is to perform some sort of clean up unless you know as a fact that the said categories' threads are note worthy or have useful information worth archiving.

Third, Edman you should really look into using the sudo-cron feature in Vbulletin to clean up the inactive members here with zero posts on a regular basis. If you would like I can provide you the script needed to perform that if you don't have one or don't know how to create it. Now while over three thousand members may seem impressive at first glance to visitors at the same time it also shows how inactive your forum seems by the lack of posts the majority of your members have under the member-listing; that wont really scare away anyone who really would like to join the community but at the same time no one will be impressed by it and it creates a hassle for anyone who wishes to sign up only to find out their name is taken by an inactive member.

- Carlos

I totally agree.
 
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