Ok, first two posts are me, quoted from B&C:
While Interference is obviously successful and hardly a deathly labyrinth, that does not mean the status quo is the most efficient or optimal possible way of organizing. As Interference is a living community of users, I think a periodic evaluation should probably happen to take the pulse of community conversation.
There are basically three options here: "nesting" front-page forums, which turns them into the same relationship as Where the Album Has No Name has to EYKIW where they're subordinate, erasing and merging forums together (The Goal Is Soul into EKYIW, for example), and bringing nested forums (like B&C) down. The point of all this is to make it as easy as possible to navigate, the front page in particular, instead of navigating through 25 sometimes-rarely-used forums. At the same time, it tries to make some of the specialized U2 forums livelier.
Any thoughts?
I'm thinking about whining to the admins in a new thread in the Don't Expect, Suggest forum about the current Interference forum layout. Jumping back to the navel-gazing upthread for a second, I think one reason that there could be a small community in B&C is that it's relatively out of the way. The front page unnecessarily dices and segregates some of the U2 content into poorly visited top-level forums while hip, hopping young joints like this are hidden.
Ideally some of the U2 subforums get nested or absorbed into EYKIW, some of the ZOOTV introduction forums get nested, and maybe ZS and B&C are brought to the main page.
Any thoughts about that? Or am I which, like the toad, ugly and venomous.
Yeah but the thing is, though, the current setup's doing a disservice to "pure" U2 fans as well. The current song lyrics forum is moving at a positively glacial pace, meaning there's little incentive for anyone wanting the reasonably quick gratification of a post in response to bother. Kind of trapped in a cycle of inattention. It's true that we're currently in a mid-album lull, but besides deleting the forum, another option would be to nest the song lyrics forum into Everything You Know along with Where the Album has No Name, hopefully leeching off that forum's popularity and general discussion nature to spark more thought, as opposed to being simply 1 of 25 on the front page.Good idea but I reckon the majority of people who sign up for these boards are here to talk about U2, so when they see off-topic forums with threads with hundreds of posts they just ignore them. It was a long while before I started posting outside of EYKIW and related forums.
It's this sort of spring-cleaning re-assessment of each forum I think is currently lacking somewhat. Should the Pen Pals forum really be above EYKIW, FYM, PLEBA, or Lemonade Stand?
While Interference is obviously successful and hardly a deathly labyrinth, that does not mean the status quo is the most efficient or optimal possible way of organizing. As Interference is a living community of users, I think a periodic evaluation should probably happen to take the pulse of community conversation.
There are basically three options here: "nesting" front-page forums, which turns them into the same relationship as Where the Album Has No Name has to EYKIW where they're subordinate, erasing and merging forums together (The Goal Is Soul into EKYIW, for example), and bringing nested forums (like B&C) down. The point of all this is to make it as easy as possible to navigate, the front page in particular, instead of navigating through 25 sometimes-rarely-used forums. At the same time, it tries to make some of the specialized U2 forums livelier.
Any thoughts?