For example, the link to the game room functions as normal, but it also has sub forums listed below that for sports, thread games, video games, and say, recreational games (card, board, etc).
You can click the main thread link to get the current thread view with everything, but you can also click the sub-forum link to just get those threads.
Is this possible? Would the SDMB consider it? It would require a little more work, but make it much easier to find what you’re interested in.
It’s possible. We haven’t done it because we prefer a simple navigational structure without numerous low-traffic subdivisions - that’s one of the reasons we made the Straight Dope Chicago and Barn House forums go away. An advantage of the fairly broad categories we have now is you stumble across interesting things you weren’t looking for. I’d hate to lose that.
You aren’t talking about sub-forums, what you want is tags. The software does allow this, and some message boards us it.
An example is the Order Of The Stick forum. That’s a popular webcomic, if you didn’t know.
go to the bottom of the page, see Thread Display Options, and select an option such as **guessing **from the list. It will display only threads with that tag.
That’s what you want, right?
I don’t think the SDMB will do this, though.
I’d consider that essential to the ongoing survival of a forum. Those that niche out tend to die off.
It’s a bit like newspapers vs. online news. With paper, you have to at least glance at many other stories and content. With online, you can get so selective that you never even see anything outside your predefined interests.
Far better to skip over a big menu than only get a choice of three items you’re known to like. Because your Gogol patterns have been assimilated.
All your Gogol are belong to us?
Thanks for the reply Ed!
Well I was thinking in the Game Room, to have a way to display only the sports threads without displaying video game threads or thread games threads. Or in Cafe Society, I could view food threads without also viewing movie/music threads. Can you do that with tags?
Yes, see the example I provided.
Tags, or prefix as they call it, include
You can select a particular prefix, and display only threads with that prefix.
If only there was some method by which one could take a hypothesis like, “Making a subforum in a popular forum will cause reduced traffic to one or both areas”, and determine the real-world effect of such a change, so that a determination could be made as to whether setup A or setup B is better.
I don’t currently have any good ideas for such a method, but I do have a name to call it if someone comes up with the specifics: The Scientific Method
I think that such a thing would help us to make changes founded on evidence-based reality, rather than hypothetical conjectures.
(Personally, I don’t visit the Game Room, so I have no dog in this fight. I just don’t buy the logic.)