SIte structure questions

[meStevo]

Some of these are short and terse, don't mean to slight any move or direction, just wondering why some things are set up this way.

Movie talk has a Now Playing subforum, seems redundant. Neither Movie Talk or the subforum have much activity. Shouldn't this be a single forum, and anything that has relevant discussion (ie is 'now playing') will naturally bubble to the top?

Network-based forums (ABC, Fox, etc). Is there a reason this isn't all just 'TV Discussion'. Also is there a reason there's no TMDB for these forums, or can you only have one?

Phone OS (Android, iOS) and different provider forums, if there's enough traffic and new threads couldn't it be a single forum? On other sites I frequent many of these are just a single running smartphone thread even.

Home Theater forums (4k, 3d etc) - is there a reason these are broken out like this? Could be a single Home Theater Technology area, w/ threads pinned highlighting tentpoles, CES thread(s) etc.

Movie and TV could live near each other in Hometown discussions, and a Technology set of forums could house some of the others mentioned above as well as things like Games, Computers, and Ham Radio Technology forums

My assumptions guesses as to why things are like this:

- SEO?
- Poke? Poke was driving a lot of the traffic in these different areas with almost automated posts about every bit of news, is that why they're set up this way? These were browsable until they were confined to a single thread, personally stopped reading them when that happened.
- Staff owners went with their vision - staff owned their areas, set it up how they wanted

I'm fine with things, but personally don't browse many of these because of how scattered things are. Sure, I won't read a HAM forum if it's moved into a technology group, but if we get TV and Movies better situated and more browsable I think there's a lot of benefit there for forum activity.

I've thought about this for a while, just finally decided to post asking about it. Again, not passing judgement, not a slight, just wondering why things are set up this way and making suggestions that would make all of this content more browsable and useful to more IMO. Nothing needs to change if it's obviously in a good place and I'm not seeing it, no hard feelings, etc

 

[Tampa8]

Some very constructive ideas, much more thought into it then I have done. I did think about the phone forum and it seemed like it could be condensed.

 

[klang]

I like the Network TV forums like they are. Much easier to find a thread for a particular show.

I suspect the Phone forums are the way they are to separate the proponents of the different technologies. Kinda like Dish vs. DirectTV.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Hmmm...

I replied to this the other day but don't see it posted so I must not have hit post reply (grrr)

Don't have time to type the book I did the other day so here's the short answers...

The movie section was setup like that as we purchased some software, so when there were new movies and someone posted about that new movie, it would change that post to have full details of the movies (promo pics from the movie, link to a video preview etc..) But that software never got up to its full potential. The author of it was gung ho about it and then seemed to have lost interest.

We probably could combine those.

The phone sections will stay the same as its confusing if its all mixed together, which is why we separated it in the first place.

The home theater areas were setup that way by request of the admins for those forums which are Dfergie and Teachsac.

Always looking for ideas to keep people posting and coming back so keep the ideas coming! They are appreciated.

 

[meStevo]

I just figured I'd written an incoherent mess (resisted going back and editing it a number of times knowing how many people had read it) and that's why people had passed up replying

A lot of these suggestions come from reflecting on my own posting habits and why I go to different forums.

Operation Sports - came for Madden discussion, actively participate in TV, movie, sports, console gaming threads and then occasionally venture into the Madden-specific discussion. I actually can't even link to these discussions because you have to be a registered member to see them, something about not wanting a bunch of non-video game sports stuff getting indexed. Whatever, SEO is voodoo. (vbulletin)

Rererolled.org - Life-long MMO fan, the only forum I've visited longer than satguys. Really just video game discussion, but also movies, tv and technology.... even great discussions about astronomy, parenting, investing, buying a home, etc as we've all gotten older as gamers. (xenforo)

Satguys - Worked at a 3rd party DirecTV call center when I created my account, so that was my thing here for a while, helping people and discussing DirecTV, was active in the HDDVD v BD war and years of sports discussion. All 3 of those things are either gone or irrelevant (Was only with DirecTV for 18 months, I cut the cord in February, NFL discussions have largely died off). This leaves The Pit, which I try and only participate in in moderation, as the lack of constructive posting is frustrating.

So yeah, based on my other habits, that's why I took a look at why I don't have the same patterns on this site. I'd browse the TV forums, but just not interested enough to browse several of them I guess (each forum only has 2-5 threads that are new in the last 3 months) yet on rereolled I browse them daily (which is a real achievement because they don't even support Tapatalk), and there's no activity in the movie forum here aside from Poke mostly. I'm interested in technology and home theater stuff, but that's more than a dozen forums between phone, home theater, PC and gaming. I used to be really active in some of phone forums but once they split up that broke my habit.

Just some perspective, if there's anything I can do to help with any of the above I'm happy to, whether that's just a better explanation of anything or if there's anything I can do to help curate any of these areas myself I'd be happy to.

 

[dare2be]

IMO, watched threads and especially Multiview makes the hierarchical structure less significant. In fact, having more specific forums (such as one for each network), makes it easier to set up multiview for only the networks you want to follow.