About This Message Board: 2
Comments on Cecil’s Columns: 1
Comments on Staff Reports: 6
General Questions: 3
Great Debates: 7
Cafe Society: 13
In My Humble Opinion: 12
MPSIMS: 4
The BBQ Pit: 5
Is there any logic to the numbering scheme? I realize that new fora were added over time, but I assume (perhaps wrongly) that they could have been re-numbered when the switch to vB was made. Why the jump from 7 to 12? I’ve seen references to a Moderator’s forum, which could account for onw of the “skipped” IDs, but what about the other three?
1-6 were the original forums here (Staff Reports used to be called “Cecil’s Mailbag,” and the forum was named as such).
After six, I can only assume are the hidden forums, accessible to staff only.
After some time, They added IMHO for stuff that maybe were deeper than MPSIMS, but not quite cut out for GD/GQ, and for surveys and opinion threads. Then came CS, to unclog MPSIMS a bit and giving entertainment and art a forum unto itself.
So the invisible forums were already established and numbered, so IMHO and CS get tacked onto those.
There don’t have to be four invisible forums. If you add a forum, then delete it, then the forum number of a new forum created afterwards is still incremented by one. This happened on my Board where, as a joke, I created a “Teletubbies Fanfic” forum, and made UncleBeer the Moderator of it. When I deleted the forum, the next one I created after it was incremented by one, so there is a gap.
I can see an argument for reordering the forum IDs, but the strong counter-argument is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” - are you sure there’s nothing going to be broken by changing the number?
I believe one of the “invisible” forums was intended to be a read-only “archives” forum that was part of a plan pertaining to old threads, a plan that never got implemented. You used to be able to get to it by manually editing the URL (changing the forumid digit). That doesn’t seem to be the case any more (that you can still view it, I mean), so they probably finally deleted it. It only had a couple of ancient threads in it anyhow, most of them board FAQs and that kind of thing.
Actually, all of them are, or more properly, were archive forums. A plan was implemented to move worthwhile threads from active forums to archive forums in the old UBB system. This was actually done for several forums. Then, when we converted the database from UBB to vB, the archive forums disappeared in the process - those data (along with forums 8 thru 11) are just gone. The conversion process actually created the forum and converted the information, but then discarded it - hence the non-consecutive forum numbering that you now see. The original Phaedrus evolution thread that ran for well over one thousand posts, “So I read in the newspaper . . .” and another great GD thread, “Why pray?” are two examples of such missing content.