The current structure of boards may have been fine for launch, but if we want to attract a higher volume, I think the M:tG foums at least need to be reorganized

"Cards and Decks" should be split into three (at least): Casual Constructed, Competitive Constructed, and Limited. Right now, you've got jank piles that know they're jank piles along side vintage theory, and no real place for forum drafts or DLCR to go. A "Card strategies and combos" forum might also be good, but isn't so sorely needed.

We should probably have a "Spoilers and Speculation" style forum for spoiler season. I know that's just passed so it's not really such a critical issue, but it would be nice to have.

In other news, I think it's worth talking about what we can improve about these forums in terms of graphic design. It would be nice to have a fancier bannerhead for NGA. Dunno what long-term-plans in the visuals department are.

Forum drafts can go to the PbP-area afaik.

And how hard is it to read tags in a topic title?

My biggest worry is that if we get more active, which I assume we hope to do, things are going to get bumped off page 1 of the current "cards and decks" forum at lightning speed: It's already a fast-paced forum, splitting it's current content in two seems like a measure for long-term health.

there was 8 unread threads when I logged on, if I played magic, finding threads for the formats I play would be tuff. subforums rock

8 topics is a lot? Damn.
I come back each day to dozens of topics in each forum because I'm from Europe and I miss all the good stuff going on, and I still think it's not as crowded as it could/should be.

There's still stuff from Thursday on the first page of the topic views.

its all relative

like incest

I think creating a banner is one of the few things on their immediate to-do list but i haven't been paying too much attention.

I think subforums should be created once we get enough traffic rather than in anticipation for it.

The current thinking is that if one topic dominates a given forum then a sub forum will be created for it.

In the Cards & Decks forum, I would like to request competitive and casual sub-forums:

Competitive
Vintage (Type 1)
Legacy (Type 1.5)
Modern
Standard (Type 2)

Casual
Multiplayer
EDH
1 v 1

So I want to be sure I understand the request, because I'm not super-familiar with the Magic side of things. If I'm reading correctly, you're asking us to take one forum and split it into six seven different forums? Yes?

See viewtopic.php?f=13&t=283?

Yup. I came to this forum from WotC forums because of the state of forums. Because they have a larger community, deck formats are usually grouped together for sanity.

I feel pretty sane with this small amount of users.

I agree that there should be subforums eventually, but for now I'd be happy with just separating Competitive play and Casual.

~SE++

Ah, thanks. I thought the conversation looked somewhat familiar...

Cards & decks currently has 45 topics. Of those 45 topics, 18 haven't been posted in during the last three days (a totally arbitrary cutoff time). Eleven haven't been posted in for the last 4 days; four haven't been posted in for five or longer.

So we are currently in a situation where in arbitary cutoff of "3 days" leaves us with more than one page of active topics. That, to me, is getting close to a break point - but not quite there. That said, when it does reach the break point I would want to follow up with as few forums as posisble - so, for example, the proposed seven forum structure would almost certainly not get my . The one linked by JaC with splitting into three is fairly reasonable looking; I could go along with that as a starting step, and then move to more later as those new forums grow and expand.

I'll promise to revisit the traffic volume again no later than Wednesday evening. I've just put a tickler reminder on my calendar for 10pm (Eastern) to do that. If we're still at about the same (or worse), we'll go ahead and do something. It won't be a dictatorial change by me - I don't know the Magic community well enough, so it would definitely involve the mods who have experience there.

Fair?

Also, merged the two threads together so all the conversation is in one place. (Frankly, it was a nice opportunity to play with the tool a bit. )

Sounds good, growth wise.

Huzzah!

I think that we've reached the point where our growth is no longer racing past our ability to moderate it, and I think that's a good thing. I think the forum split, when it happens, will also both make moderation easier and posting simpler.

We absolutely do not need to split all those forums up.

For those of us who posted on the Vintage forums, we saw how lack of posts caused people to not even give it a chance.
We finally had gotten traffic a ton before Gleemax completely nuked it and it never recovered, and to this day are completely, utterly, embarassingly, dead.

Keep them all as one until there is enough traffic we have to split them.

Tony - that's exactly what we want to avoid. Thanks for giving a concrete example.

Could there be a forum for RPGs other than D&D? I know that covers the vast majority of it, but I've seen a few posts about 40K, and personally, I like Pathfinder, though I know it's a lot like 3.5. While D&D is the most popular set of systems on the boards, there are a lot of others to cover...

EDIT: And yes, I know the Other Games section, I kinda meant a specifically Other RPGs section. I dunno.

~SE++