Forum sparseness

[wrbt]

This (obviously) isn't a bug.

To me it's quite apparent this forums has been overly subdivided. Yes, I remember the recent reorg and some things you don't really find out until you try, but there just isn't the post counts here to support the granularity of the forums.

Example: Resources with a textbook subforum.

Why? Textbooks are certainly resources and I doubt you've been getting complaints from people that the textbook threads are making the resources forum unusable. The result = the textbook subforum has activity in a thread every couple of days, looking at the last post dates it's just dismal.

There are other instances similar to above example, and one problem you might have is people who might otherwise participate aren't because they don't want to scan 2-3 places of threads. They might go to look at textbooks but if it's in the study resources forum maybe something else will catch their eye and they'll post there too. Nobody is saying "bah it's too hard to find textbook threads in this study resources forum" are they?

Chinese history hasn't had a post in two weeks, with the runner up thread 3 weeks before that. Adsotrans hasn't had a post since a week before I ate turkey for Thanksgiving. Wouldn't arts + literature and the music forum be a little more alive rolled into one since they are all art? How about movies + television? Technology instead of adsotrans, zdt, maybe as a sub forum of study resources?

You guys do a great job (thanks!) and I love looking at this place, but I think a little bit of contraction is called for in the forums organization.

Thanks again, and have a great weekend!

[chrix]

I'd disagree about History, because look at the number of threads there are, there have been quite a lot over the years. It's neat to have them all in one place.

About the cultural stuff, they're already subforums of Culture, I don't see a problem either way, but it's probably the way things have developed.

Adsotrans and ZDT might be due to historical reasons, I'll leave that to people more familiar with the the history of the forums.

Textbooks are one of the most important resources, I find it quite fitting to have a subforum for them, though you could see that either way.

Most forum regulars use the New Messages function anyways, so I don't see a problem with splitting things up. I think the admins are keeping a good balance between the lumping and the splitting approach (and I'm not just saying that because I got the subforum I wanted )

[kdavid]

I think everything is fantastic the way it is.

Sub-forums have most likely been created as the admins saw that enough threads regarding a specific topic were being created and discussed as to prompt the need.

Keep up the great work!

[renzhe]

How about movies + television?

I don't think this is a good idea. The Television forum is dominated by the first episode project, and it would quickly become difficult to find any movie among all the series threads. In fact, this is the reason why the Films & Television forum was split up into Films, Television and TV Series/First Episode Forum because people were complaining about the First Episode spam. Then Television was mostly empty, so it was merged back with the TV Series. The current setup is better than any of the previous ones, IMHO.

I think that one important function of this forum is providing resources to people looking for specific information. Information about China and Chinese in English is very hard to find on the Internet. Proper separation of topics helps this.

Whether the current split is perfect, I don't know. I don't have a problem with it, but I wouldn't like it getting split up even more.