Improving Gamingforce

Originally Posted by The Dopefish

This might not be a popular idea, but we seem to have a lot of sub-forums that just don't see much action. Combine that with the fact that we have a large selection of subforums and new people might be overwhelmed. (I know the counter-argument to this already, but we're not Something Awful. We're not NeoGAF either. We simply don't have that many people running around here at all hours.) We have thread prefixes and people use them, so there's really no reason why we couldn't merge more of the subforums together. Creator's Cafe and I make a bitch sandwich could be merged into a umbrella creativity subforum and, even more outrageously, maybe even merge Media Center and Video Gaming.

I'm just waiting 'til the Political Palace and the Quiet Place get merged. Now THAT would make for interesting discussions.

On topic now, I tend to disagree with welcoming just anyone with open arms to the forums and letting threads be created that aren't at least somewhat thought out and different form the last 20 threads that were created. I'm not much the socializing type whether in real life or online, and this is about the only place I've ever come to consistently for that precise purpose for as long as I have. It is as far as online places go anyway. A big part of the reason this is has to do with the fact that I know if I come here and read a thread, I'm almost guaranteed to find some food for thought on the subject of the thread. This is a rarity as far as I've seen on internet forums, and throwing that away simply for the sake of having more movement seems like a shame to me. I'm sure many forums have interesting threads buried beneath the thousands of shitty ones about X video game character is hotter than Y, and post your 100 best video games of all times, and so on. I keep coming back here on a regular basis because I know that if I have to sift through shit to find something worth reading I won't spend an hour looking.

I do agree however that a bit more activity would be welcome, and the only way I see that it would be possible to do that without sacrificing the things that make this place great would be to find a way to get more visibility. Be it through advertising of some big event that we would organize on the boards or simply through everyone doing their part in coaxing friends to join for a given aspect of the site, there would be ways to attract new people without having to lower the level of discussion to the lowest common denominator of the internets.

Jam it back in, in the dark.