Collapse some forum sections?

[Fink]

Hey Berendol:

As a number of the forum sections aren't at present to heavily used, what do you think of collapsing into one (or maybe less than the current number) some of the "Mangband Players" forum sections?

Perhaps

What I hate is when...
Item Trading
Yet Another Stupid Death
Help! I died!
Adventure Stories

Could be collapsed into a "Game Related: stories, trading, in-game help, etc" section.

Whatayathink?
-fink

[Ashi]

I know those areas were pretty active in the early days when there was a lot of activity, but now it would make sense to reduce them since there are some other active servers which have forums of their own in which that stuff is taken care of.

I'd suggest the stupid death and adventure stories could be combined into one "day in the life" kind of place for any server.

Maybe the trading and help forums could just be put into one MAngband.org forum to go along with the other server specific forums.

[Berendol]

Oy, that's gonna be a lot of work since I have to move the messages piecemeal. I'll see what I can do over the next week or so.

Or... you could invite your friends to play, and get these forums heated up again

[Fink]

Here's my general thinking on section rearrangement and collapsing:
(I use the terms "block" for a collection of "sections". Red bits indicate a new section.)


[hr]
General
     - Combines New Features in 0.7.2 (mangband.org servers only!) , Items slated for 0.8.0, and Why isn't 0.8.0 out yet?
     - New Players moved to Mangband Players block.

     News
     Official Release News
     Forum Requests
[hr]
Servers
     - Combines the Mangband.org and Third Party servers blocks.

     Mangband.org General discussion
     etc.
[hr]
Mangband Players
     - Combines the Player to Player and Mangband Players blocks
     - General Conversation and General Discussion sections combined into one.
     - Character Contests, What I hate is when..., Help! I died!, Adventure Stories combined into one, "In Game". Also, thread from the *Kings* lounge moved into here.
     - New Players moved to this block
     - The Think Tank moved to the Mangband Developers section
     
     General Discussion
     New Players
     In Game
     Item Trading
     Yet Another Stupid Death
[hr]
Mangband Developers
     - The Think Tank moved here from Player to Player block

     The Think Tank
     General Development
     Bug Reports
     Port Specific Discussion
     Wish list items
[hr]
*KING* lounge
     - Remove, dumping existing threads into the new combined In Game section
[hr]




Whew! So, our new forum could look like this:




[hr]
General
 News
 Official Release News
 Forum Requests
[hr]
Servers
 Mangband.org General discussion
 etc.
[hr]
Mangband Players
 New Players
 General Discussion
 In Game
 Item Trading*
 Yet Another Stupid Death
[hr]
Mangband Developers
 The Think Tank
 General Development
 Bug Reports
 Port Specific Discussion
 Wish list items
[hr]
     
     * Due to the light use of this section, it could be moved to In Game. However, the topic, really, is more appropriate to server-specific sections. That is, each post for a have/need are for a specific server, and not "general".

Also, we could argue that the General Discussion section could be moved to the top General block - this being that we already have a section for general game-related stuff ("In Game").



Now, of course, thats a whole lot of work to do, heh. Berendol, if you ever wanted to do some kind of wholesale reorg such as what I list above, give a shout - I'd be glad to help out. I know it's a lot of message-at-a-time work do this kind of thing.

~fink

[Berendol]

I've been wanting to do something like that for a while now. It's going to be a big job and I am seriously considering your offer. I'll get back to you in a few days.

Well, we've got 935 topics total. Assuming two topics moved per minute, which is about reasonable given the speed of the webserver, that's 8 man-hours of work if we have to move them all. I figure we have to move about half of that, which puts the estimate at about 4 man-hours. During that time, it would be important to keep the forum in offline for maintenance mode.