To have no misunderstandings, first something about the used terms.
1° What we often call "our boards" has an official name:
Midnight Mansion Forums
. Plural.
2° MMF is divided in
categories
. E.g. "Free Chat".
3° Each category can have multiple
forums
or
boards
. Both words are synonyms. And a very popular example is "Talk". With this software one can NOT create subforums, what is a pity.
4° A forum or a board contains
topics
. Every forummember that is at least a Lost One, can start new topics.
5° When a member starts a topic or replies in a topic, he makes a
post
or a
thread
. Also synonyms.
The current issue has to do with our most popular category: "Custom Mansions Area". And especially everything that has to do with the oncoming or existing mansions. There are now already over 75 custom mansions created by nearly 20 designers. No wonder that 168 topics have been started, with a current amount of 1.963 posts. I don't think that the large number of posts is a real problem. But, from the point of view from a member who is searching for something particular, we have to deal we two important things.
1° How can we organize MMF, so that a member may find his/her way within 168 topics?
2° How can be avoided that the name of a topic doesn't cover the contents of all posts?
Suppose that MMF only has one forum to discuss all our mansions: "Talk". Then we would have a board with ... 50 pages? And it is not because a topic or post is old, that it isn't important. So we are forced to have a system to make searching for an item reasonable.
The very first thing that comes into my mind is that there is a serious problem with the topics-subjects. Very often one can't know what a topic is about without opening it. And that is assumedly the major problem. (Not only here, but in almost all forums.) With what we did in the past by creating a few extra forums like "Talk/Midnight Mazes and Monsters", we do not only have the problem with why (not) and when (not), but this way of further dividing also has an other side of the coin. When starting a new topic in this kind of forum, for obvious reasons, no one starts with telling about which mansion the topic is about. That makes bringing this topics back to "Talk" rather difficult.
As administrators we can do "everything". That means: manually!! Even making archives. A few examples:
1° each time that someone starts a topic we can correct the subject;
2° each time that someone makes a post we can check if it is completely to the subject and, if not, start cutting and moving.
No forummember is expecting that from us, admins. I think.
But that doesn't take the problem away. Suppose I want to know something about House of Coin. Do I need to open "Stuck in room 15933" or "... and again!"? And that brings me to aquaMat's remark that too many individual boards for custom mansions would make the browsing harder. He is right of course. But when I bring this issue in balance with the much bigger problem that even experienced forummembers have, when they want to see if a Q&A is already on the forums, I believe that there isn't much choise. And opening category-folders is less work than opening tons of topics to find out what they are about.
Giving all custom mansions an own forum would, for the time being, be over the edge. But to keep it reasonable, my final suggestion is to work with 19 forums:
- "Talk" for general issues and the only mansion of which no one so far could recall who the designer was (Knu's Infinite);
- one "Talk/...." for each designer and on the homepage you may see the names of the made mansions.
In this way, I hope that a (new) forummember may find faster what he/she is searching for.
Concerning the other question about topics that have posts not-to-subject, I think that once in a while we, active forummembers, need to remind each other about staying to topic.
I await all your replies. Don't hesitate, because, as I said at the beginning of this post, this issue is about
OUR
Midnight Mansion Forums, not the admins'!