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.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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Go is such a beautiful game.

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

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.

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Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

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

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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.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

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.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

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

The subforums have one really important function: marking an entire set of things as read.

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Occupy Babel!

That's only useful if you know it's a feature, which I did not until now. Thanks!

I think that we might benefit from more sub-forums, with related discussions in proximity. How often do we have the same or similar discussions? If there is any value to retaining old discussions -- which there is --, I am not sure that we should just rely upon the search function to find topics of interest.

In another forum database I was involved with, we used to have people who worked on a daily basis at organizing discussions in a tree structure. We called them librarians. Just as a library is not simply a collection of books, but has a structure, they were concerned with the structure of discussions.

Which reminds me. How is the Go Discussions archive coming along?

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not so well, to be honest.

there was data corruption, so I'm sure we don't have all of it.

and I've been super busy at work.

I love libraries. But, librarians cost time and money. If xed_over doesn't have time to archive Go Discussions (no offense meant, of course), who has time to enforce structure here?

I personally don't mind the structure, I just suspect we'd gain more users and therefore more content with simplicity. Of course current users are satisfied with the status quo, else they wouldn't be current users. It all depends what the goal of the board is, to please current users, or to grow and become an increasingly important and useful resource. The likes of reddit r/baduk haven't caught this board yet, but traffic is increasing.

_________________
- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders