I'm sure you've probably noticed by now that the forums have been rearranged. There has been some discussion on a number of occasions about doing this, and we've finally pestered BlackBox into making some changes.
Anyways, here's some of the things we had talked about.
You may remember we used to have a "Feedback/Suggestions/Problems/General" and a "General/Issues/Other". The difference between the two was not clear, so merging them seemed like a good idea. Also we removed the "forum" forum section, and merged it with "General Community". After all, why would a forum have a forum named "forum"? Seems a little redundant to me, and an overly useless name that doesn't really say anything about what should go there.
We'd also talked about reintegrating the archive section back with the original posts. At first we thought pulling them out of the original sections would help clean up those sections. We've found however that it complicates searching for old posts, which are sometimes still relevant, doesn't do too much to clean up the old sections, since old posts get stuck on later pages anyways, and also creates a lot of dead space on the main page that isn't of much interest because, by definition, there were never any new posts there. I don't believe the threads were going to be unlocked though, if they were already locked.
Another suggestion for the archive, was to have Archive sub-forums in each of the larger forums. Although, there was one slight problem with this idea. The forum software doesn't allow sub-sub-forums, so sections that are already too deep couldn't have their own archive section.
The forum and section "General Main" was changed to "General Interest". The forum "Outpost Programming" was changed to "Outpost 2 Programming".
You may also notice the development sections have been lumped together. This was one of the uncertain areas where we haven't fully decided what we want to do. Perhaps some input from the people using those sections would help.
I had suggested most of the subforums in "Main Projects" should be placed under Outpost 2 Programming, since that's really what they mostly are. (Outpost 2 Update, Renegades, Colony Games, Mapping/Mapper). Also, the Mapping/Mapper areas could potentially be merged with the Mapping forum already under Outpost 2 Programming. The one exception is the "Colony Wars" subforum, which might be placed under "Other Projects" instead. There are also some loose threads in there that should probably be sorted on an individual basis. With that done, we could probably get rid of the "Main Projects" section, which is a horribly vague name to begin with.
I was also thinking all the sequels (Outpost 3 projects), and remakes (Outpost 1) could be placed together. Possibly in two seperate forums, or a merged Sequel/Remake forum? Maybe the merged option just in case someone does a good Outpost 2 remake, so we'd have somewhere to put it.
Another suggestion was moving Genesis to the Inactive Projects section.
Of course there is a problem with moving Genesis to any subforum, whether it's Inactive Projects, or Sequels/Remakes. Genesis already has a number of sub forums, and again, the software doesn't allow sub-sub-forums. This basically means we'd have trouble moving it off the main page. We'd either have to remove the subforums, and perhaps dump all the threads in the Genesis forum itself, or somehow modify the forum software to support that extra layer of forums. Neither option sounds too great.
So, if you have some good organizational change ideas, particularly for the development section, feel free to suggest them. Or perhaps changing the subtitle/description of existing forums to better match their content. (I don't think we really looked at this too much yet). Just keep in mind the no sub-sub-forum restriction. Remember that we can rename and add new forums if needed, as well as merge existing ones.
