Personally, I think having more boards makes it difficult for each individual user to consistently spot new threads across all of them, and - unless implemented with thought - can lead to having multiple borderline-inactive boards as opposed to one active one. I think it's important to monitor the activity on a new board before making a decision on whether it needs sub-boards.
Like, the purpose of a lore questions board is to allow people to ask their lore questions and receive answers from the community, right? So you have to make it easy for both people to ask a question, and people to find questions to answer. I'm worried that splitting it would make it hard - for both people who need help, to know where to ask; and people who are offering help, to find threads they can weigh in on.
I used to ask myself before splitting a board, three questions:
Obviously #3 is an easy question to answer when it's two topics being forced to share a board together and constantly butting each other's elbows (example from my past: art vs stories, where both parties constantly felt the other was bumping their topics off the first page before they got attention), but when you're dividing based on more nebulous topics then you have to consider if there'll be overlap where users will end up confused about where their threads belong. #1 and #2 just require monitoring of the forum's activity over time.
And if the desire for sub-boards is about categorising threads for archiving purposes rather than activity ones... maybe a masterpost of quality threads on various topics would be better? Probably ultimately easier on the moderator team, too, since it'd just require updating every now and again (say, regular sweep of the board for new threads worthy of addition every 2-3 weeks) rather than constantly monitoring threads for whether they need to be moved or not.
But that's just me and my experience with message boards in the past. I openly admit I haven't been here for long, and I'm basically a random stranger hehe, so it's entirely possible my experiences won't apply here.
Like, the purpose of a lore questions board is to allow people to ask their lore questions and receive answers from the community, right? So you have to make it easy for both people to ask a question, and people to find questions to answer. I'm worried that splitting it would make it hard - for both people who need help, to know where to ask; and people who are offering help, to find threads they can weigh in on.
I used to ask myself before splitting a board, three questions:
- is the board actually active enough to warrant this (i.e. it's receiving so many new posts that new threads are buried too quickly to receive any replies);
- will all of the proposed sub-boards be receiving at least one new post, each, per day (so, say, splitting into two slightly broader categories might be more pertinent than splitting into multiple extremely narrow ones);
- are the divisions clearly defined (i.e. most users will, most of the time, mostly make their threads in the correct forum without a moderator having to intervene; and is there a minimum chance of one topic fitting into multiple boards)?
Obviously #3 is an easy question to answer when it's two topics being forced to share a board together and constantly butting each other's elbows (example from my past: art vs stories, where both parties constantly felt the other was bumping their topics off the first page before they got attention), but when you're dividing based on more nebulous topics then you have to consider if there'll be overlap where users will end up confused about where their threads belong. #1 and #2 just require monitoring of the forum's activity over time.
And if the desire for sub-boards is about categorising threads for archiving purposes rather than activity ones... maybe a masterpost of quality threads on various topics would be better? Probably ultimately easier on the moderator team, too, since it'd just require updating every now and again (say, regular sweep of the board for new threads worthy of addition every 2-3 weeks) rather than constantly monitoring threads for whether they need to be moved or not.
But that's just me and my experience with message boards in the past. I openly admit I haven't been here for long, and I'm basically a random stranger hehe, so it's entirely possible my experiences won't apply here.
![[Image: tUzrT.png]](https://puu.sh/tUzrT.png)
