This year a Boo! Forum was created for Halloween. I never really visited it and I never really figured out why it was created when in the past forum sprawl has been pretty heavily fought. But, nonetheless we got it. Maybe it was a trial run, maybe it was a failure, not sure.
Here we are closing in on Thanksgiving. Lots of recipe and advice threads popping up all over Cafe Society and probably a few in other forums. I can see a benefit to consolidating them all in a dedicated Thanksgiving Forum or probably a more practical general “Holiday” forum.
What’s the plan with Boo!? Can we rename it “Holidays” or something wittier and make it an ongoing thing or are we destined to stare at it as stale and lifeless as Comments on Cecil’s Columns/Staff Reports for the next 11 months?
I’d like to suggest that rather than keeping a locked subforum around, the threads currently in Boo! simply be moved to MPSIMS and the forum itself deleted. Most are already old enough that they won’t clog up the front page of the forum and honestly, nothing in that forum is going to be interesting to future posters. Down the road, new visitors aren’t going to marvel at the fact that back in 2011 a handful of people discussed Halloween-related topics for a couple of weeks.
I see that Boo! have been moved to a subforum of MPSIMS. However we can’t see any of the content in it. Is that a property of it being archived and is it the intended goal, or is the database just still chomping on it and it’ll be available to read later? Did something go wrong?
Not a bad solution. Any reason temporary silos like Boo couldn’t be a recurring theme? Thanksgiving could be a opportunity and then when the holiday is over they could be dumped into Cafe Society.
It’s all about interest. We did Boo! because, well, it just seemed like a good idea. It was fun for the moderators too, to come up with it, develop it, etc.
We’re still basically making it up as we go along, just like we always have, hopefully enjoyable for everyone.
What we really need is an End of The World forum to run between now and the end of the Mayan calendar in December 2012, so that end-timers can run ideas for final preparations by the Teeming Millions, set up get-togethers in the great beyond and so forth.
So Boo has been moved into MPSIMS as a sub-forum… is it going to keep on cluttering up the top of the thread list like that? If so, that’s a real nuisance - especially as it’s closed to new posts - when I visit MPSIMS now, I don’t see any threads at all above the fold.
Wow, I had to reopen MPSIMS to look. I had already opened MPSIMS, but didn’t realize it. That was just more clutter at the top to scroll past and get to the interesting part.
On the advantage of keeping it a separate subforum, it allows keeping images active in the thread.
On the advantage of merging with MPSIMS and losing the subforum, it gets rid of clutter.
I have to confess… I saw “Boo” as a somewhat annoying irritant and totally unnecessary because all of those threads could easily have been put in MPSIMS, IMHO, or Cafe Society. I didn’t like it, and would vote to do away with it and not do similar in the future.
