Blaze - I do understand what you are saying, but there is a different bit of strategy behind what I have done in the discussion forums that might be different from what a lot of other webmasters are looking for. Many sites are just after traffic to their site. Traffic is great to attract advertisers, sure, and one way to do that is by having forums where people will go and post messages and replies to other messages. People reading and talking among themselves is a great way to get the traffic needed so that advertisers will be seeing the hits on their banner ads.
And yes, this is all well and good, but I think there should be more to it. Quite frankly, this site already has the traffic needed to keep most advertisers happy even if I completely removed the entire Discussion Forum section. So what I want the Discussion Forum section to be (and perhaps I made a mistake even naming it that), is to be an information resource, provided by and for all of the members here. That is why the segregation into subforums is necessary. If you take a look at that *other* site, sure their forums get a lot of traffic, but it is the same questions being asked over and over again. Why is that? Probably because most people just cannot FIND what they are looking for, so they have no other choice but to ask the same question that was asked and then answered, last year.
I am using a text book as a template to what I think these forums need to be structured like in order to be able to provide answers to people asking questions. Take a look at a typical forum on any site. How many of the posts there are from people looking for answers to questions? I've been on the net for a pretty long time, and I've seen this a lot, not only in my own message boards, but in others as well. In order to survive the future and meet the needs of a lot of new people getting into this, information resources such as this will just need more structure.
Look at the forum map for this site as being the table of contents, just as you would find in any good text book. Then look at the "search" function as being a very capable substitute for the Index function you would find in this very same text book. Those are exactly the ways most people would try to utilize into zeroing in on information they are seeking out.
So when I restructured my CornSnakes.com message board a while back, I decided on a more structured layout, and really had no idea whether it would fly or not. But results seem to be pointing to it as being pretty much on target. So when I decided to greatly expand the discussion section on this site, I felt that this structure would eventually prove to be a more long term benefit than a more wide open approach could ever hope to provide. I guess maybe I'm looking a little farther down the road than maybe I should be.
I don't make any secret of the fact that I am setting my sights pretty high on the type of people I am targeting for this site. You will notice that I did NOT include any section entitled something like "What should I name my xxxxxx?" But if someone has a Leopard Gecko, for instance, and has some questions about how to breed it and what to do with the eggs, it seems logical to me that this person would be able to more easily find the answers to their questions by going to a section "Lizards->Leopard Geckos->Breeding/Reproductive Care" and be in the right neighborhood. Why should someone seeking out this sort of information HAVE to wade through several discussions about what to name a pet, in order to find this information they are seeking?
So yes, it most certainly is going to be confusing for some people at first, but I do believe that once it has become established and enough people have contributed a baseline of information within those forums and subforums, then there will be no easier way to actually zero in on the information that a person is specifically interested in finding. Granted, some people will just want to read ANYTHING about a particular topic, but I don't believe it is any real hardship to have to jump from one subforum to the next in order to do that.
If I had chosen to go with the more typical method of having one large forum just for Leopard Geckos, yes, traffic would probably build up much more quickly. But eventually I would have been faced with the problem of breaking it up into subforums anyway, and I would have had to manually segregate all of the threads into the respective areas, which would have become a daunting task. Meaning, I might never have done that, and all this would be is just another typical message board, just like the other one.
Perhaps this will not fly simply because it will not be able to reach the critical mass necessary to make it happen. That certainly is a possibility. But I believe that having people put in specific care sheets (one for Breeding/Reproductive Care, one for Behavior, one for Health Issues/Feeding Problems, etc.) will go a long way to help those forums all become the information resources I am envisioning. Obviously, I should start the ball rolling by doing this myself for the Corn Snakes section, but I sheepishly have to admit that it hasn't been real high on my priority list right now either. I am rather "spare time challenged" right at the moment.
Anyway, I hope this has provided a bit of background info on what the design thoughts are behind the structure of the Discussion Forums. I guess it's just a matter of me giving you all the tools and the raw materials to help build something here that could be of immense value to everyone in the future. I certainly cannot do it all alone, and am asking for you all to pitch in any way you can to be a part of all this.
I will do whatever is necessary to hold up my end of this, as long as I feel that YOU all are in here with me.
Thanks.
Rich Z.
