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I've had this idea in my head for awhile now, but perhaps maybe this forum is a little too large for our current userbase. It's no real big secret that activity has been dropping off recently and I think part of the reason why is that everyone is scattered all over the place. There's just too many sections to be keeping track of, and things can easily go unnoticed with the amount of forums and sub-forums that we have.

My proposal is that we temporarily trim the forums down a little. Using the anime section as an example, we temporarily shut the anime section down due to a lack of activity and house all anime/manga discussion into the one big megathread instead. Which can be situated in either Community or Off Topic, or wherever else appropriate.

It might seem a little drastic of an idea at first, but by consolidating everyone into a smaller area, there will be more chances of user interaction, which I believe will help encourage more postings.

Sections that I think that can benefit from this are the ones severely lacking in activity such as Anime, Arts and Graphics and ID Merchandise to name a few.

As an experiment, we can roll it out onto the anime section by itself first and see how that goes before looking at whether other sections that could benefit from the same thing.

Originally, Initial D World had very few sections, which worked well for the relatively small amount of members. I like your idea and will discuss it with Perry, as I've always seen the ID Merch section in particular to be a complete waste of space. ID Torrents is also near the top of my shit list.

Probably the best way to implement this would be to simply shut off member access to a section and put it into a temporary area until activity picks up again, whereupon it would be reactivated.

Is that also what happened to the WMMT subforums? I also like this idea, but I would have no idea where to start with the reorganization. You have my support on this topic and I will try my best to come up with ways to help with the move.

We don't have to trim everything down in one go and to be honest that might be biting off a little more than you could chew anyway. It's perfectly reasonable to do it bit by bit and slowly progress the idea throughout the whole forum. After all, what's the rush? Sometimes too big of a change, too fast can be off-putting to people.

While I like Tessous implementation to restrict access, I still think there's worth in having the 'downsized' sections still visible for history's sake. Kind of like a look but no touch arrangement.

Would it be possible to make a new archived forum and place all the 'downsized' sections in there as sub-forums? Maybe we could even name it the IDW Museum to stay classy

This post has been edited by bROCKoLEE on Jul 20 2012, 10:38 PM

You also have my support, Brocko. I can't believe I never thought of this before! I can say it definitely would be temporary, though, because we need to be prepared for the surge in activity when Fifth Stage is announced.

Locking sections but leaving them visible would be very confusing. I don't want to have to deal with a bunch of newbies joining the forum and asking why they can't post in certain sections.

I think Brocko's other suggestion solves that - split the now-locked topics/forums onto a separate site and call it the "IDW Museum" or whatever.

I gave this idea some thoughts and I have mixed feelings about it. Allow me to explain myself. Trimming down the section(s) is a visual thing like you said and the forums are visited by 45% repeat users, which means the proposed change will impact a little less than half of the visitors. As you know, the forums haven't changed much since 2007, so a change of this "magnitude" can only be matched by the section expansion from the very early days (pre-2004)

Now that we put some context in this, I want to say I do like the idea. It is more efficient to display less sections. Fewer places for people to go to meaning each section will have a bigger chance of being clicked on, creating a better focus for all the sections. In theory, each section will seem a little livelier.

Let's talk about the caveats. So what's to lose? By doing so, we will lose _any_ opportunity of thread revival in any of these forums. Instead of a thread revival of (hopefully) content-worthy post, it would be condensed down to a post in a mega-thread. I am still against all-in-one type of threads simply because it may create the illusion of activity in terms of post count, but in the long run it contributes to the slow death of forums. When people stop making new topics, the forums are dead. We don't need the New Topic button if everything can be said in existing topics, but I digress.

Even though those forums seem like they have no activities post wise, it doesn't mean they are not being visited by guests or members. We are still being visited over 1,200 times a day (800 unique visitors give or take), taking away sections from the front page will lower our traffic considerably and will have many irreversible long-term effects such as degraded SEO performance and less backlinks. Case in point, our forums was down for 19 hours back in January, Google dropped our search ranking for "Initial D" from 8th to 12th over night. It took five months to regain that 8th position in the first page search result. If we were to move all these less active sections to an archive directory, it'll cause Googlebot and any other search engine bot to drop ranking results for the topics in those sections, thus resulting in less traffic in the long run.

Tessou and I will discuss about this either tonight or tomorrow and see what we can do about this.

Very good points, Perry, I hadn't considered that. I'm not so sure how I feel about the idea, then. I'd have to think about it more. I'm sure there's some middle ground that can be found.

And that's why no action has been taken on it yet. We'll discuss it and figure something out. Remember that in the end, we might just not do anything along the lines of cutting or closing sections.

I'll play the devil's advocate and just ask, what is the point of the high ranking if there is nothing to back it up?

There is no income generated off the site in any case, or not income that anyone knows of.

That's fine, dude. Immediate action wasn't necessary anyway, in fact I'd rather prefer it if this was thoroughly thought through instead. Because as expressed by both myself and Perry, it is a rather drastic change to implement. There's no need to rush it through overnight, I mean what are we racing against really?

I see what you're getting at with this, especially how no new topics can eventually lead to the demise of the forums. But bringing up the anime section again, any new thread creation or thread revivals gets passed over very easily based on the title alone. People are judgmental like that, they look at the thread title and go "oh I have no interest in that series" and skip the contents of it entirely. This is very concerning to me because the actual posts and contents of the thread don't even get a chance to prove their worth at all, they simply just weren't given a shot to.

I've seen countless thread creations and thread revivals in the anime section that only managed to spawn a quick handful of posts at the start of its life, only to die back down into obscurity again, waiting for that next single post bump that goes entirely unnoticed or left 'un-responded' for a lack of better term. Whilst combining all the posts into the one mega-thread can indeed give an illusion of activity, I do believe it will help encourage more postings, at the very least in the anime section anyway.

I can only really speak for the anime section itself, because that's where the bulk of my exposure in the forum lies but I don't think the section is dead entirely because of a lack of interest. I mean I know there are at least several members here alongside myself who do watch anime shows on the regular and I'm sure they would have something to say each week whenever a new episode comes out, no matter how big or small it may be. Yet they refrain on doing so. I can't exactly speak for them why that it so, but in my case it's largely in part that I already do have the latest post in that thread and constant double posting is bad mannered. Not to mention that it'll probably be overlooked anyway due to earlier explained reasons, so that puts me off even more.

With the mega-thread idea, because everyone else is doing their bit at filling up the pot, you run into this stop sign a lot less. Likewise it's also less likely to have your content be passed over too. The added exposure could very well help entice readers to join in on the discussion or even have them pick up a show because of it, furthering the potential for more discussion in either cases.

I've seen this idea work on another forum and what happens is you get a little mini-community living inside the thread that self sustains itself. Whenever anyone watches something, they make a comment about it in the thread no matter how big or small. It goes unresponded? Cool, the thread still ain't dead, people are chiming in with their own thoughts about other series anyway, life cycle goes on.

Where as in the current model, "no one responds to my post? Other threads are just as dead, I make a new topic, that goes unnoticed... what else is there to do?"

The current format is too sterile and relies too much on a back and forth type conversation to keep things going, something that our relatively small user-base isn't able to sustain. Remember it takes at least two to tango and even then two will only get you so far. The megathread idea allows more freedom and flexibility in posting habits, the trade-off is that you get the one big pile of posts instead of something neatly organised by topic. But if that means an increase in activity, and I believe it will, then imo, that would be a worthwhile trade-off to make for the meanwhile.

I very much dislike the idea of having entire sections hidden away too. I think people are starting to slightly misunderstand my museum suggestion earlier. If I may clarify again, we make a new section on the forums front page and re-oraganise all the 'closed down' forums into that new section. Again, still visible on the front page and open for browsing, just no posting is allowed. If anyone wants to quote an old post or rebump a thread they can still do so manually and post it in the megathread.

The current layout:
- IDW Relations (Announcements, Feedback)
- Initial D (General, Merch, Music, Torrent, AS)
- Automotive (Tech Talk, Auto)
- General (Community, OT, Arts, Anime, Games)

Mock new layout:
- IDW Relations (Announcements, Feedback)
- Initial D (General, Music, AS)
- Automotive (Tech Talk, Auto)
- General (Community, OT, Games)
- IDW Museum (ID Merch, ID Torrent, Arts, Anime)

Would the metrics still be affected just as bad even though the sections are still on the front page to browse, just slightly out of order? It is a very legitimate concern to consider and I am glad you've brought it up. This never would've occurred to me otherwise if I hadn't created this thread.

Maybe we don't even need to re-organise things, just lock the sections up from posting and plaster a big sign explaining the situation and where to find the replacement mega-thread that houses discussion now.

If you ever need to talk to me about this to discuss further, I'm normally on the IRC channel throughout the entire weekends anyway. I really do think we can benefit from this so long as we take the necessary steps to make sure it's properly implemented. Again, I would like to highlight that a lot of what I've posted applies mainly to the Anime section, and that other sections may not fall under the same points that I've raised.

This post has been edited by bROCKoLEE on Jul 21 2012, 04:44 PM