Has the powers that be at SD ever considered adding three new boards: One board should be for computer questions; the second board for sports questions; the third board should be for all the crude, perverse and/or generally sexually-explicit questions?
I gues you could also add a health message board and a science message board? This may help keep the General Message Board a little more on-target. Maybe these subdivisions are little too parsing, but perhaps some of these suggested boards are warranted.
Well, from what I gather, one big reason they’ve been reluctant to add forums (not entire message boards, as you mean) is that doing so would disrupt the free-form shape (!) of the board as a whole. I don’t know if it’s technically feasible, and doing so might make the whole operation look more streamlined, but it would also remove the whole benefit of interacting in different forums/message boards.
Not where we wanna go. There are better sites for computer related questions. While se don’t actively discourage people from asking them here, we’d prefer they didn’t.
Not where we wanna go. There are better sites for sports related questions. Besides, Cecil hates golf.
Definitely not where we wanna go. I suppose, but I don’t know for sure, there are better sites for explicit sex questions. We try to limit the prurient content here already. Opening a forum for that would be counterproductive.
No way do we wanna open that can of worms. We believe a health and medical information forum would be too much of a legal headache and we’d prefer they’re not asked here at all. The Reader attorneys are busy enough.
Science questions are encouraged (as long as they’re not your homework) in our General Questions forum. There’s no need of a separate place for them.
Additionally, more forums means more moderation. We’d need an army of mods scurrying about trying to make sure everything’s in its proper place. With a limited number of forums, there’s a limited number of places to put things; it keeps the decision tree pruned to a managable size.
Also, Unc, I dimly recall one of the other mods (Coldie, maybe?) once mentioning that adding a forum didn’t so much redistribute the traffic as add to it by suggesting whole new areas for us to chatter about. (E.g. there’s probably a whole lot more discussions of books, movies, the arts, etc. in Cafe Society than there ever used to be in MPSIMS and IMHO.)
And until y’all have got a handle on metamorphosing board traffic into board revenue, I can understand you wouldn’t exactly be looking for new ways to generate additional traffic here. The hamsters have a difficult enough time as it is.
Sure, an invalid good point is one that means well but can’t get around easily.
I also remember reading about the addition of new forums. Seemed at first like all the computer questions would go to the tech forum, thereby removing traffic to GQ, but instead it would create much more in the new forum. Plus (IIRC) the server pulls from the database as a whole when a thread is downloaded, not just one part.