Suggestion: A reduced number of forums

[Key]

Originally Posted by Guybrush

This seems like a weird strawman argument. You might be making stuff up, my man.

Not arguing. Just saying my personal side of it.

[Trollheart]

Yeah I have to agree with Key, your comment Tore seemed out of place. He's not saying this is how it should be, he's describing his experience of the forum, which is I think how most of us perceive and use it too. I can't see how it can be seen as any sort of an argument, never mind a non-gender-specific one made of thatch and hay.

In other news, I think you kind of have your answer, though admittedly it's only been up one day, but as they say, vox populi and all that. They appear to have voted for the

[Frownland]

I think the forum would be better if we all tried to be the bloat we want to see.

Also I'm not down with the ska erasure this would entail.

[Trollheart]

Pffft. Erasure aren't a ska band. Everyone knows that.

[Key]

I also only use the "new posts"function so I never really look at the main homepage most of the time.

[SGR]

What I really want is GIF functionality in the shoutbox so I can post dancing Chris Christie GIFs. #MakeMBsShoutboxGreatAgain

[Guybrush]

Originally Posted by Key

Not arguing. Just saying my personal side of it.

That's not what I was referring to.

Originally Posted by Key

If you don't want to post in a specific forum, just don't post in it. The amount of subforums rarely if ever deters me from going on with my forum experience. Seems pointless to worry about it.

I'd agree with both these statements and neither worry, nor feel adverse to posting in any specific forum, so I just didn't quite understand what warranted this comment.

[Key]

Idk man I just post in my journal. I just dont think it's worth trying to "fix" anything at this forum when it works perfectly fine the way it is. Other than aesthetics, there doesnt seem to be any other reason to trim anything down.

[Guybrush]

Originally Posted by GD

Just my personal opinion, but I think merging all music-related forums/sub-forums into a single big one (if this is what you are proposing), with no way to sort things apart except for what has recently received new posts, could quickly turn into a a cluster****. It would make me dread browsing music-related threads because the ones I was interested in and wanted to read were lumped in with a lot I don't care about.

However, if we had a forum like your "Music corner", essentially replacing the "General music" forum we have today and maybe a few others, and then sectioned off genre-specific discussion into its own forum, with a sub-forum for each category, I could actually see it helping to declutter the website and making the front page a little less bloated (and make it easier to access the Shoutbox and the Lounge for that matter) while still not making it difficult for users who were searching for genre-specific content.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts, and for the record, I wouldn't mind if the site stayed the way it is now either.

Thanks for your input, GD. I actually agree with you, at least to some extent, in that I would prefer to have a few music forums rather than just the one. I would like to se perhaps two or three. It wasn't in my suggestion because with the time I had, I couldn't come up with a satisfying way to divide music related discussion into a few forums that would cover all the bases and be clearly delineated / not overlap so that it would be clear to people where a thread should go.

Your suggestion about one general and one for genre discussions (with subs) is a possibility. I also considered separating by content type (like reviews are a separate type of content from discussions) or decades or perhaps broad stroke descriptors like popular music and avantgarde. None of these seemed quite satisfactory to me, but I'd still like a few music forums rather than the one if one could find the right set of forum themes.

Originally Posted by Key

Idk man I just post in my journal. I just dont think it's worth trying to "fix" anything at this forum when it works perfectly fine the way it is. Other than aesthetics, there doesnt seem to be any other reason to trim anything down.

I see a few here describe things as perfectly fine. I get that not everyone will want to trim the forums because it is a radical suggestion and I understand that. However, I can't get quite behind the statement that everything is fine. Just a few items from my immediate wishlist:

• A vbulletin update so that the site is more mobile / tablet friendly
• The possibility to tag users in a post so that they can be notified when addressed
• Replace the blue theme or make it optional and for Darwins' sake clean up the white pixels around buttons like "Post reply" or "quote"
• Remove censoring of swear words and the like OR at least make some changes (I can't write Marvin Gaye?)
• An improved capcha for better spambot prevention

If I were running things, you bet I would be on Advameg to implement these things and more. However, I fortunately am not riddled with the headache of running things and that mostly spares me from a continous uphill battle against a community where most of the people who wanted more for MB have already left and the people who stuck around are the guys who seem completely complacent or even happy with the admin neglect and abandonment that has turned MB into a sinking ship in a losing battle against social medias and other music forums that are able to update and implement welcome changes. Whatever the deal with admin is, the most disappointing thing about MB, by far, is that nobody left seems to care about its' wellbeing.

[Frownland]

Did you ever get those deets on what exactly the vbulletin update would entail? The site's mobile functionality seems fine.

We don't have tagging but we implemented notifications for when your posts are quoted, which is close. You have to enable it though.

Never noticed the whitespace, we can look into that.

The censorship is an advameg requirement for our SEO, can't undo that one unfortunately. If we requested this, they'd probably end up implementing a way to block our current workarounds .

We're only gonna implement things that are fixing problems or are widely considered as useful. Minor aesthetic adjustments won't undo the declining significance of forums that is causing membership to dwindle. I think improving forum culture would be the best protection against that. That said, SGR's GIF request is a good one. I'm thinking about reaching out to Yac about increasing the PM limit for established members as well. Don't let me keep you from congratulating your hypothetical initiative as a mod though.