General Forums Reorganization - your thoughts, please . . .

The current structure of the forums is basically what I came up with sometime in 2003; when I didn't think anyone would ever visit the site, much less that they would actually post anything here.

I think it's probably long overdue for an overhaul, to make the site easier to navigate (particularly for new visitors - regulars tend to click on 'new posts' and be happy) and find information. The below are some of my thoughts, bolstered by the valuable input of gougou and imron and some suggestions that have been posted by the membership in general. As you can see they're not 100% formed, and none of this is definitely going ahead - it's more a case of 'this is some stuff I should probably sort out, and while I'm at it, why not . . . '

Living and Studying in China

- City / (Province) Level subforums (each containing: discussion for that city and a sticky for each university, perhaps also private school. Busy schools, perhaps BLCU, may get their own subforum? On principle do this by province, but when a city is larger or more active (Kunming, Chengdu, Dalian) have a city-specific forum.

- Beijing

- Hebei

- Nanjing

- etc

- City / School choices. For people who haven't decided yet to compare, get advice. Must be informed questions.

(currently we've got a situtation where info about, eg, Wuxi, Dalian Institute of Technology, could be in several different topics, possibly with none of them having accurate titles. That information needs to be easier to find, both for users and search engines)

- specific visa / visa application subforum

- General Teaching issues (anything specific, ie particular schools, goes under the appropriate city forum

Study Journals

- subforum, one topic per person, kind of study diary - what they did, problems, blah blah. Discussion here should be fairly limited here, new topics started elsewhere for anything in depth.

Beginner's Forum

- where answers should be kept simple, with the assumption that not much Chinese can be read. Inevitable overlap though

(do we also want Intermediate / Advanced forums, or just a general non-beginner one? Where would we draw those lines, and what about discussions that start simple but then go into more depth once the original question in answered. I can see the need for a less-intimidating place for those on Chapter 1, but not sure how best to do it)

A lot of Computing could be elsewhere, mainly Resources and General Study Issues. Leave a 'Technical Issues' forum for more complex stuff?

Specific forums for Textbooks, other 'bought' resources like CD-ROMs?

HSK forum, perhaps HSK + other exams

Rate my pronunciation / am I 准 or not. Not sure this would generate the posts to justify its own forum, but it might be worth a try.

RSS forum of news feeds, podcasts, maybe some blogs. Anything that doesn't get a reply in 24 hours gets deleted. Would be high volume, probably group members only to avoid overwhelming anyone not interested.

'Real Chinese' - genuine Chinese content, news, podcasts, blogs, selected to be interesting enough for learners to tackle, no more than a few pieces a day to stay manageable, Chinese language content could be promoted out of the RSS forum into here.

Chat&LE + Other cultures:

General Discussion - does not need to be on the general Chinese/China topic, but does need to be in someway useful / constructive.

Subforums for other languages, eg, Japanese, according to demand. Would run on the same principle - in English, about XXXX. Would need at least one native speaker / advanced learner to moderate, plus a decent amount of interest.

Thoughts?

I don't have any huge problems with either the current layout nor the proposed one.

One thing to keep in mind is that the main strength of this forum lies in the user-generated content. Stuff like information about schools, visa procedures, user-generated flashcard lists, summaries of study tools, vocabulary lists, grammar explanations, the list goes on and on. The discussions are fun and all that, but what sets this forum apart from many others is that the posters are productive and there's lots of material on this forum that would make commercial blog/website owners drool. The blatant stealing of the forums' content is proof for this.

Sometimes a lot of this stuff goes unnoticed. Even experienced forum-goers totally missed the TV series subforum and the BotM, for example.

Perhaps this would be something to consider -- maybe an up-to-date index with all the useful content accumulated over the years, somethine like the grammar rules sticky in the grammar forum.

I think a subforum for each province might be a bit of overkill. Most of them would just sit empty.

Yeah, I was thinking about that. Maybe the most commonly discussed / visited from cities. In terms of visits, the 25 largest cities for the last month were:

Beijing Changchun Changsha Changzhou Chengdu Chongqing Dalian Guangzhou Hangzhou Harbin Jinan Kunming Liuzhou Nanjing Qingdao Shanghai Shenzhen Suzhou Taicang Tianjin Wuhan Xiamen Xian Xiangtan Zhengzhou.

Although this wouldn't be a huge long list taking up the forums listing, I'd set them not to display there and hard-code them into a description, like is done with the classifieds and the teaching in China forum here. I think though there might be advantages in having one single topic for each university, under the relevant topic, so anyone passing through can click through very easily rather than having to search, figure out the most relevant / recent topic, etc. And a provincial / city basis seems the most logical way to do that.

I agree a lot of them would not be very active, but if they're all folded up out of the way.

I'm not sure about the best way to do this, but I do think we need more structure than we currently have.

Very very well thought out proposals.

Will there be a separate section for ongoing "clubs" such as Book of the Month Club, Monthly Short Story Reading Group, Song of the Day etc? Will each club be assigned its own moderator?

My only problem with the forum is having to stop and try to figure out which of

Resources and General Study Issues

and

Chinese Computing and Technology

is the right subforum for something I want to post.

It would be nice for volunteers (i.e. not me ) to summarize popular/recurring topics and, kind of like renzhe suggests, create a list of popular topics with links to one consolidated thread for each topic.

Book of the Month already has it's own subforum, although I suspect it may be better off mixed in with Reading and Writing, or Art and Literature (hmm, maybe we need a Chinese Books / Reading forum - ie, for general discussion of Chinese literature, rather than learning how to read) as it may be more visible. I think the same thing goes for the short stories. Song of the Day is currently just a single topic, I can't see any benefit to making it a subforum.

Moderator status could be given if there's a need to move posts around, edit other people's posts, etc, but is there? Any one off changes that need done can just be requested via the 'report post' button (not by asking in the topic, there's no guarantee it'll get seen).

Character snuck a post in while I was posting.

Yes, there's overlap between those two forums. I do think we need a separate section for discussion of more technical issues, but there's certainly some need for change there.

Re the editing together of links to useful topics, the maintaining of an index, etc - hmm, you mean like . .. a wiki?

Seriously, if anyone wants to do anything like that, go ahead, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help. Similarly, if you'd like to be able to edit existing stickies (say to add new links to the grammar one), let me know, that can be arranged. Somehow

I wouldn't say we need moderators as such (I think we're pretty much on top of that. Seen any dissent lately? No, didn't think so ), but there's the scope for some editing - going through old posts, deleting anything that just isn't of any value now, merging and moving stuff around, etc. If anyone's interested . . .

Art and Literature (hmm, maybe we need a Chinese Books / Reading forum - ie, for general discussion of Chinese literature, rather than learning how to read) as it may be more visible.

Yes, that would be better. Keep the learning-to-read separate from already-proficient-readers. The two groups differ in their needs, purposes, goals, etc.

Art and Literature would be the place, I guess. It's mainly books and stuff now, I think, anyway.

Nice idea, roddy.

Subforums for other languages - very good idea. I'd like to see subforums for French, sign language, whatever language is NOT a dialect of Chinese. I see there are subgroups for Arabic, Russian, and Japanese going on right now.

The subforums for other languages aren't a huge priority from my point of view, and I don't particularly want to duplicate anything already available elsewhere (surely there are, eg, forums in English for people learning French?). But where there's a demand (we seem to have quite a lot of Japanese learners, for example) it's a possibility.

How the social groups are going to work out, I don't know. I suspect they may be better folded into their own subforums or sticky topics, but again, that's not a priority.

Thanks to everyone making comments, by the way, even an 'I'm not bothered' is useful information. Would be very keen to know what people think of the idea of a beginners forum, the RSS News forum thing, etc.

the maintaining of an index, etc - hmm, you mean like . .. a wiki?

Or perhaps a monthly newsletter or something

Exactly like that

I'm a "New Posts" kind of guy who only looks at the forum topic areas when I need to start a new thread. I guess the way to look at this is to see whether newbies are managing to post in the right areas and also whether they're asking question which have already been well answered.

If both of those point to newbies being able to find stuff and work their way around without issues, then it's probably not worth changing anything.

I won't like a big overhaul... I'm a person of habits, and I like it that I know blindly where to go here.

But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea, you probably have a point that newer people need to easily find their way.

As to Living & studying in China, perhaps you can make subforums for the bigger cities, and then one forum for 'other', people who don't know where to go yet can also post there.

As to a 'beginners' forum, that might be useful, but a discussion can trail off to more advanced things, and what do you do then? Perhaps you can make a 'beginners' level' tag (there probably is one already, I never used the tags), and give it a prominent place somewhere, and make it very easy for beginners to tag their topic as such. That way, you can just keep the beginners' posts in the regular forums, and it doesn't matter so much if they trail off.

I didn't see you mention the 'tattoos and quick translations' forum, but make sure you keep it, a lot of people get good answers there. Also you didn't mention the various 'Chinese Culture' forums, please keep those!

Keep the learning-to-read separate from already-proficient-readers. The two groups differ in their needs, purposes, goals, etc.

Isn't it pretty well split already? Easy reading recommendations and help with difficult sentences go into Reading & Writing, BotM-kind of things (vocab lists, discussion) go into Art & Literature. Except for the actual BotM, actually it might be a good idea to move that one.

I agree with the idea of moving the electronic learning material discussions into Study Resources, and making a new forum for technical things and problems with them.

On the surface it doesn't make sense to have subforums for other languages, but the thing is, when I need to know something about another language or culture, I prefer to ask here, where I know the regulars to be helpful, international and knowledgable, instead of going looking for another forum where I'll have to wait and see if I get an answer and how reliable it is. So I'm all for at least keeping the 'other languages and cultures', and if people want it extended, I fully support that even though I probably won't go there.

A small request not about reorganizing but about a forum rule.

Can we relax the restriction on the film/TV forum from strictly Chinese made films to all China-related films?

That should include:

Made by Chinese - That's what we have now and should be the majority.

Acted by Chinese - e.g. "Memoirs of a Geisha", "Mongol", all silly movies Jet Li and Jackie Chan made for Hollywood.

Directed by Chinese - I think that's specifically for Ang Lee for now. Brokeback Mountain was good, wasn't it?

Set in China - e.g. Kung Fu Panda. This one is obviously popular, but the thread in currently in the chatting forum.

Filmed (partially) in China - e.g. Mission Impossible 3, Kill Bill 2.

Foreign made documentaries

I think "Look, Keanu Reeves is speaking Chinese!" is a bit far off. But, if people like talking about it, why not?

I think a beginner's forum is a good idea. Maybe a large number of common themes/issues could be stickied in it, helping to reduce re-inventing and re-searching.

I think forums dedicated to Chinese content is a great idea. Especially on more of the daily type reading. There is a wealth of book and tv show suggestions on these threads, but I don't often see suggested news articles, blog entries, etc.

What would an RSS or news forum look like? Would that automatically produce threads related to news articles, that people could then comment on? That would be cool.

Good luck on the overhaul.

WRT wikis and such (looks like one was tried and didn't work out) perhaps start with the list of frequently started threads for each subforum?

I really can't see any point in a monthly newsletter considering I check in literally every day.