Subdivideing the Community Forum

[MacNut]

Is it time to subdivide the Community Forum, we have 3 plus active pages and searching through them is getting to be a chore. I propose dividing the forum into groups, Sports, TV/Film, and Special Interests. The amount of "look at my new car" and "what's your favorite soda" threads should be separate from say Baseball or Football and the Lost and 24 threads. Any thoughts.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

I tire of of the whats your favorite color threads or another wii thread also though I dont know if thats the solution. Why not first require someone to have X amount of posts before allowing this nonsense plus that will free up the servers.

 

[MacNut]

Ya we should just have a postable wasteland for some of the stuff thats floating around here.

I don't know that you can keep people away from the community since it is called community it will be hard to regulate what is posted. Having a place for the fluff would make it easier on the eyes tho.

 

[Doctor Q]

We've resisted subdivisions before for the simple reason that we don't want to encourage or discourage certain topics and would find it difficult to choose subforums.

For example, we're not a sports-themed site, so it doesn't seem important to have a specific subforum for sports, but you are right that we do have a number of sports threads because many people are interested in sports. Even if the case for a sports subforum was clear-cut, there are so many potential subject areas that it would be quite difficult to decide on the categories. I bet we could name dozens of potential categories without much effort.

We do try to keep Apple and Mac and other computer threads out of Community Discussion, for example, moving threads about PC games to the Games forum, questions about shopping for non-computer ideas to the Buying Tips, Advice and Discussion forum, threads about current events to Current Events, threads about web sites to the Apple, Industry and Internet Discussion forum, and so on. What's left is supposed to be a catch-all for all other topics, i.e., what you call "Special Interests".

As often happens with Forum Feedback threads, I've jumped in with an explanation of past policies, but without an intent to cut off discussion. We really are open to suggestions like this. Please share your ideas about it and tell us specifically what you would find most useful.

 

[MacNut]

I understand the difficulty but the Community Forum is so congested and arguably the busiest forum here. Maybe making 2 categories Entertainment and Human Interest would be enough.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

I understand the difficulty but the Community Forum is so congested and arguably the busiest forum here. Maybe making 2 categories Entertainment and Human Interest would be enough.

I would think a better solution would be to treat community more like the political forum. X amount of posts before allowing just anything in the community forum. Perhaps a minimum of say 100 posts or so before opening it up. Since we are a Mac community those should be open to everyone but perhaps the others like political,community,marketplace etc should have a post counts first to weed out some of the stuff. just my thoughts on it.

 

[MacNut]

There are currently 443,188 posts that would get whipped from the books and I don't think a lack of post count will stop the "chunky or smooth peanut butter" threads.