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 Post subject: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:17 pm 
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Joined: Thu Jul 02, 2009 7:43 pm
Posts: 373
My suggestion for improving the forums is essentially to simplify them.

Remove many forums that are infrequently visitied and merge them into other forums.

A sure fire way to KILL a board and make it dead is to have too many forums gathering dust and cobwebs with tumbleweed blowing around in them. You can see it already happening here - many of the subforums are just dead, and the huge number of forums, combined with their poor activity levels deter people from using the forums.
Its far better to have a smaller number of ACTIVE forums with lively discussion.
Its a basic best bractice for a successful forum that you only dilute discussion into sub-forums when there is an overwhelming amount of discussion around a particular theme that is distracting and overwhelming the general varied discussion in the main forum.

My suggestions:

1 - Move 'Ideas and Suggestions' forum from 'Main' Category into 'Support' Category

2 - Move 'Important Information' forum from 'Main' Category into 'Support' Category'

3 - Get rid of 'MMA Competitions League' forum and put the couple of posts into the main 'MMA Competitions' forum

4 - Move that 'MMA Competitions' forum into the 'MMA Community' Category

5 - Delete the (now empty) 'Main' category

6 - Merge 'MMA ASIA Shows and Events' forum into the main 'MMA Shows and Events forum'

7 - Combine the following forums into a 'General MMA Discussion' forum (this would be the main forum - active, lively, thriving):

- MMA Polls
- MMA Video
- MMA Politics
- MMA Art
- MMA Dojo
- Comment on Instructionals
- Ask Away
- MMA Discussions

8 - Remove many of the forums from the 'Chillout Room' Category, and create threads for them in the 'General MMA Discussions' Forum. (For example - Recommend a movie does not need its own forum - its perfectly served by a single thread in a forum:

- Create a general 'Chill Out Room' Forum
- Merge the 'Games Section' into the 'Chill Out Room' forum
- Merge the 'Recommend a Movie' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'Jokes' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'News' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum
- Merge the 'Funny YouTube Clips' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'Post a Pic' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'Chit Chat Away' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum

9 - Move the new 'Chill Out Room' forum into the 'MMA Community' Category

10 - Delete the old 'Chill Out Room' Category


After all this the new forum structure would look like this:

CATEGORY: Support
- Important Information
- Ideas & Suggestions
- Support Forum
- Guides and How To's

CATEGORY: MMA Community
- General MMA Discussion
- MMA Competitions
- MMA Shows and Events
- MMA News
- MMA Events Ratings [NO SPOLIERS]
- MMA Events Discussion [SPOILERS]
- Chill Out Room



Greatly simplified, easier to navigate, less daunting for new users, and most importantly, will maintain a healthy level of activity in the forums.

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:09 pm 
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Joined: Thu Jul 02, 2009 7:43 pm
Posts: 373
PS: This post isnt to say there will NEVER be a need for some of these subforums - but rather that the subforums should only be created when there is a genuine need for them

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum103/587.htm
http://www.googlelady.com/196/the-abc-o ... ful-forum/
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=303260

Quote:
* A lot of dead boards out there made the easily-made mistake of starting out with too many subforums. It's easy to see a lot of established boards with a forum for each specific thing the community could ever want to talk about. What you don't realise is that all those forums weren't there at the start. You should have AT MOST ten forums on a new board; don't be afraid to lump similar topics of discussion together; for example a fish forum should only start off with very broad forums, maybe one for 'tropical fish', another for 'freshwater fish'. Resist the temptation to have, from the start, a forum about Koi fish, one about Carp, and another dozen for every species you can think about. It's effort to move from one forum to another, so your members won't do it much; you'll get much more activity and participation if you have five interesting threads next to each other in one forum, rather than five threads in five different forums.

* Once a forum grows so big that you feel interesting threads get pushed to page 2 (and thus ignored) too fast for most members to see it, that's when your boards will benefit from splitting a forum into two smaller ones. You might feel it's finally time to give Koi fish their own forum if the existing forum has a lot of talk about Koi fish; or you might want to take discussion about Aquariums elsewhere. Only create a new forum if you need to make an existing forum slightly less active, and if you're sure enough people will talk about the subject of the new forum. That's how those huge boards came to have so many forums; splitting the big ones into two smaller ones.



http://successfulforum.com/2010/01/the- ... our-board/

Quote:
The painfull start up! 5 tips to start your board

2) Don’t have too many forums. Users do not like empty forums. Having 15 categories and 20 forums is a terrible idea to start off with. You have to condense your forum until it starts to attract members. You will have to talk about multiple subjects under one forum until you start to get enough content from your members in order to create a new forums and sub-forums. Having an empty forum will not encourage users to join as they want to be in the best forum where the best discussions happen and if they see you have board with empty forums they will leave.

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 5:11 pm 
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Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:55 am
Posts: 400
I do agree that the forum can use some polishing up and the overview could be a bit better than it is now but I think it is also a part of the questionnaire that has been set up here. That is set up for people to tell us where to improve and what we should maintain to stay at top or at least grow towards it. So it might be better to let the members speak before we start changing anything.

Another bad thing with changing forums might be the google spider recognition. If we are changing a lot, several google results might end up in old links until it has been updated. That might be something else we have to look into.

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 5:27 pm 
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Joined: Thu Jul 02, 2009 7:43 pm
Posts: 373
Dragonfoxy wrote:
I do agree that the forum can use some polishing up and the overview could be a bit better than it is now but I think it is also a part of the questionnaire that has been set up here. That is set up for people to tell us where to improve and what we should maintain to stay at top or at least grow towards it. So it might be better to let the members speak before we start changing anything.

Another bad thing with changing forums might be the google spider recognition. If we are changing a lot, several google results might end up in old links until it has been updated. That might be something else we have to look into.


Sure, a quote from that questionnaire thread:

sixdemonbag wrote:
There may also be too many forum categories for a community this size.


Its not about polishing from my perspective - its about basic forum structure.
The content is all great - its just spread too thinly across too many forums.
Its basic forum management stuff - only create sub forums when there is a genuine need. At the moment we are severely choking the forums growth.

WRT engine spiders, thats not a concern at all - any forum restructure would not change the thread links themselves, which is what the spiders crawl over.

Nothing would be changed before soliciting input on this specific subject - thats what this thread is for.
But what ive suggeste dis really just basic forum management 101. I dont know how to emphasise the importance of it any more.

Of course I write all this with the assumption that its a goal to have the forums popular and used regularly as a true community, as opposed to just a place where people visit once every two or three weeks and dont contribute much if anything in terms of discussion.

Think about what it means in terms of ease of use, appearance, perception etc......its nothing revolutionary being proposed - just simple common sense.

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 11:34 am 
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Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:49 am
Posts: 545
there are alot of sub genres in the forum..i normally go to topics that are under the shoutboxs as the place is too big..or i check on threads i may have started. would love the forum to be more active.

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:20 pm 
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Joined: Thu Jul 02, 2009 7:43 pm
Posts: 373
This is what we're trying to improve:

Posts per day: 18.08
Topics per day: 3.72

If you remove the topics created by admins or mods, the stats would look more like:

Posts per day: 3
Topics per day: 0.5



Have your say people - if you dont agree with any of this, post a reply and explain why. Its a very important discussion to have, whatever the outcome.

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 4:53 pm 
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Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2009 1:56 pm
Posts: 268
I'm completely with subvertbeats on this one. I would also strip out a lot of the subforums and just keep the remaining areas a lot more active. Like jnrpepaseed, I also tend to only check the threads linked to in the Forum Latest Posts box on the front page, but at least then if the "action" was only one thread up in the forum it would only take me one or two clicks to go check what other threads are active at the moment. Right now I'd have to spend a couple of minutes clicking around and checking.

I'd even combine a few of the proposed new groups, just to further push the active threads closer together:

CATEGORY: Support
- Important Information (Guides and How To's) Have the FAQs/guides be stickies
- Support Forum (Ideas & Suggestions)

CATEGORY: MMA Community
- General MMA Discussion
- Competitions
- MMA Headlines (Upcoming Events and News)
- MMA Event Ratings [NO SPOILERS]
- MMA Event Discussions [SPOILERS]
- Chill Out Room

This way, all the news articles and upcoming show notices would be in one section, so very quick to check out other stories and see who's posting replies in other threads. Say the Latest Forum Posts box tells me the info for UFC whatever is coming up. I go there and read the show info, post up that I am excited about it and maybe reply to someone else's comment. Then I just need to click once to go up a level to see all the other threads with event news, fighter news, etc., and straight away I know from the red dots which other threads are active. One more click gets me into a second thread and I comment again...

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 6:16 pm 
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Joined: Thu Jul 02, 2009 7:43 pm
Posts: 373
Even better suggestion Ob, like it.

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 Post subject: Re: Forum Suggestions
PostPosted: Sat Feb 27, 2010 1:22 am 
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Joined: Tue Apr 07, 2009 12:53 pm
Posts: 13407
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Obskewer why are you not a mod here? ;)

Ben & co, great work! :)

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