Forum Performance - Part Deaux

ericmedley

In light of the grumbling about the forum performance - I thought I might throw this idea out to all y'all...

What if we took some of the granularity out of the forum hierarchy? Right now the forum displays as a pretty vast set of granular topics that I find visually confusing. Instead of having the whole variety of Topic divisions, perhaps simplify it down to some key components.

A brainstorming thought might be just a few basic divisions:

Netlinx Programming
DUET Programming
AMX Hardware: (no subdivisions - just any AMX box)
AMX Software: No subdivisions - just any AMX software like RMS
ModPedia (Just change to Software examples or whatever)

If you think about it - we don't have a ton of traffic and most inquiries or discussions typically fall into one of these wheel houses.

My thinking is (knowing BBS software) taking out a lot of the granularity might help performance a bit. It also might help juice up conversation if we are all looking at less white noise.

Also - I'd recommend we take out the "reserved spaces" like ACE. I know there are many ACE's who continue to not have access to the ACE section. Since there is a smaller crowd hitting the forum I don't feel we need to section off a private club. There is just not that much traffic there anyway. I'm in the VIP group and there hasn't been any activity there for ages.

So, to recap:
1) Trim down the forum hierarchy to 5 sections (with now subsections)
2) make forum access flat to all members - (no "members only" clubs)

To the forum admin - my thinking is we'd just need to do a bulk move of all posts to the proper new sections and delete the old.
That's my idea.