Gillespie wrote:I have (in the past) urged Jeff Cashman to split the forum into sections on family history, current events and so on. I belive Jeff thinks it is better to "lump" the whole mess but sooner or later it will have to be sorted out.
I'm definitely not opposed to organizing the forum into subforums by topic - I had put it on my mental to-do list once it started getting say a dozen posts a day. My fear was/is that if we create too many sub-forums that get only 1 post a day or none, it would look deserted and people wouldn't like more clicking to see the handful of new posts. But maybe just creating sub-forums by topic would spark more activity on each. What do you suggest
- history/genealogy
- general discussion
- internet
- political banter
- ? open to suggestions for others ?
We can still have an option to 'view the posts since your last visit' from all forums, but it
would be a tiny bit more effort to see all the new posts from a given day.
Now Rich,has me curious about the history of the board
If I remember correctly, in 2003 when Phyllis made her beaverislandnews.com forum subscriber-only, Rich called me to setup an "open" Beaver Island forum for him. We had setup a forum on the Beacon site 6-12 months prior but there weren't many people posting still, so I presented the idea that instead of setting up a third forum, since there weren't very many people posting to either of the two existing forums, it would make a lot of sense to consolidate our efforts so that we could get as many people as possible visiting "the forum" and hopefully reach a critical mass of interesting posts rather than having everyone visiting different Beaver Island forums. So we setup the unbranded beaverislandforum.com on top of the existing beaverbeacon.com/forum database - the logins and database are currently the same between the two.