consolidate some forums?

[swamp]

I am not a big fan of a lot of forums... any suggestions on merging some forums?

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

Something I've noticed from the few forums I have visited is:

The more forums a site has the more contributing members it seems to have. Many people are particular about the places they post and there are some sites that I only visit one and sometimes two forums on the entire site. If those forums were consolidated with others, I probably wouldn't go there.

Alan

[swamp]

well if something needs to be added or deleted let me know

[ncboman]

If you look back to when the forums were most active, you had networking working for you. Forums had moderators and each mod had a personality and a group of posters that found that personality acceptable. Traffic was heavy.

Then you had mods/admin cross from their own forum to police someone else's forum and trouble started. This went round several times with the owner stepping in only to make matters worse. Some left. Then there were the money pleas, repeatedly. Some left. All the while for some reason or another, active and much read posters were banned from time to time, sometimes in mass.

Now it's got down to a handfull of guys left and some of us are still troublemakers. At this point you ban one, you just about clear the site. What do you do? Let the site go?

I think it's fairly clear, if you want to rebuild the site.

Keep all the forums active with an open mind for creating more. Put mods in each forum. And stop posting to the site.

other than that, I don't have any suggestions at all.

[Twanger]

NC - your PM's are full....

[Twanger]

Swamp - The older I get, the more a sense of history I seem to develop. I love the fact that we still have Brownie's Tavern. I miss Cindi's place. That forum added an extra dimension to this site that no other hunting site I know of has.

The number of forums seems about right.

We just need membership.

[Altjaeger]

I think we were most active when we had fewer forums. As I recall when I first came game was divided as deer, big game, international game, turkey and upland, and small game/varmits. That caused say a elk hunter to come closer and be more likely to read and comment on perhaps a moose or bear post.

I do think NC is right on most his analysis, particularly the need for good moderators who take the personal responsibility to make regular posts that generated discussion to a forum of their interest. Don Wald was without a doubt the best at it. However, without a change in atmosphere I doubt there are many who would volunteer.

I might recommend to that current events witha political slant such as immigration, BP, oil spills, drugs wars etc. be posted in the 2nd Amendment/Political forum.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

I liked the "Gunsmithing" forum. When everything is lumped under Rifles or Firearms, a lot of guys just don't bother to look through the threads to find what they are looking for. I know that when I am looking for something specific that I don't spend any time at all trying to wade through pages of gun talk to find what I want. I just try somewhere else.

Personally I like diversity in my forum activity. I want to look under "Handloading" and find 'Reloading', 'Rifles', 'Pistols', 'Shotguns', 'Black Powder', 'Cast Bullets', etc. "Bowhunting" should contain, 'Compound', 'Recurve', 'Longbow', 'Big Game', 'Small Game', etc.

I could go on but I'm sure you get the picture. If you lump everything under "Deer Hunting" then people with specific interests don't even bother with the site at all. It is those people who have specific interests that carry with them the greatest degree of expertise on those subjects and attract others to the site.

If everyone recalls the old F&S site was just a running diatribe of a mishmosh of subjects. As soon as there was something better people dropped it like a hot rock.

Now, with all that said, it is possible to get too diverse, or rather to lose organization in diversity. The AR site for example has a multitude of forums but they are not in any particular order/organization. It's nearly impossible to keep up with a thread because of the disorder. I haven't logged on there in a long time so things may have changed, I don't know.

My opinions are free BTW.

Alan

[swamp]

Yes having Moderators would be awesome!

I am taking ALL of the suggestions under advisement...

How about starting with the HUNTING Category.... what forum additions, consolidations, deletions do you suggest