Considering the activity of the forum and the difficulty of knowing when a post is made unless you check the boards frequently I think we should just combine all the boards into 1 board for easier communication and to hopefully encourage more posting.

If collectively there is a decent amount of new posts then MAYBE 2 boards. But the oldest post on this board is from July 2014. So I think 1 board should be plenty,

Thoughts? Throw stones?

I think thats a great idea! We should make sure that all the other boards are clearly marked *Inactive* though. This would probably improve the amount of posts as well as making everything clearer, and I see no downsides.

I could go for that. I hid a bunch of unnecessary forum categories maybe a year or so ago and yeah, they could definitely be condensed further for now. I don't think 1 is enough, though, as we need as a bare minimum the following:
- 1 for actual discussion
- 1 for people plugging their own work
- 1 for help with the site

I really don't want the latter two things popping up in the discussion section.

What would you want done with the old sections if we were to do this? I could either hide them (so they're only visible to mods/admins) or I could just mark them as inactive.

I want to see what kawaii and ozone think of this idea, too.

Okay, I just had a quick look and here's what I would do.

General Discussion
Random Discussion
Debate and Discussion
Comic Talk, Tips and Tricks
Media Megaforum
Forum Games

Condensed into one.

Help, Support and Suggestions

Stays the same.

Meet, Greet, Show and Tell
The Marketplace

Condensed into one.

Networking and Community Projects
Drunk Duck Awards

I guess these could be condensed into one? I dont
necessarily want to take away the DD Awards forum because it was given one for
a reason, so Id want to hear opinions on this.

Interviews

I would probably just leave this marked as inactive, but not
hidden. Generally when we do interviews now theyre in newsposts or quackcasts
but I want the old interviews to be accessible.

That would give us either four or five active subforums:
- General Discussion
- Help, Support and Suggestions
- Meet, Greet, Show and Tell
- Networking and Community Projects
- Drunk Duck Awards (maybe)


Any thoughts?

I'm of the mind that until more boards are NEEDED we should condense things as much as we can. This will make things much easier for us to find and make the forums look more active.

I looked in every board you listed at the amount of activity and number of semi active threads in them and from what I saw I think we should reduce ourselves to 2 maybe 3 boards at the most.

Here is how I'd condense it down.
Stickies/FAQ Board—————-
because there would be too many stickies on any given board otherwise
interviews news and such might go here too since they don't get a lot of comments here.
Pretty much every sticky thread would go in this board. We may want the most active to go to the lower boards. But I wouldn't have more than 2-3 at the most in each of the lower boards.

General Board————-
General Discussion
Random Discussion
Debate and Discussion
Media Megaforum
Forum Games
Help, Support and Suggestions

Comics Board—————–
Comic Talk, Tips and Tricks
Meet, Greet, Show and Tell
The Marketplace
Networking and Community Projects
Drunk Duck Awards

As someone that has run the DD awards in the current forum format it really doesn't need it's own board anymore.

The question of hiding them or labeling them inactive. Label them. There is still a lot of good information and history in those boards.

If /when a board begins to really get more threads popping up then we can pick out the most prominent topics and make a new board based on that theme,

EDIT: To add to this a bit I'm wanting us to work from smaller to larger. I know a board dedicated to helping with site problems sounds like a good idea but there isn't a lot of posts about it there. Most actually seem to happen in the random topic thread from what I've seen LOL

Basically we are spread throughout a few main threads on the forum. IMO we should drastically shrink and then expand out a little at a time as needed till we find the balance of multiple boards and activity maintaning due to comfort and accessibility,

EDIT 2:
In fact since most issues cannot really be resolved at this point it'd be easier to just keep using the BUGS sticky as a mega thread for user issues. Again, if the 1 thread starts getting too active and users begin to start getting their issues skipped because new users post and get their issues answered instead then we can expand. That'd be a good thing! But right now 1 thread would work for that stuff IMO

The main thing I'm not on board with there is that I really don't wantMeet, Greet, Show and Tell combined with other discussion boards. I'm radically anti-spam. :P

I'm also not sure that having a “Stickies” sub-forum is a good idea. I think people would ignore that board entirely in favour of the discussion-geared sections, and so the most important/active threads would get missed by new users.

The “Help” section of the forum is more geared towards people having trouble with understanding how to use the site, not with bugs. I would be okay with just giving that its own thread that mainly directs people to the DD Help Site rather than a whole sub-forum, though.

Another thing I want to look into doing is possibly adding an iframe somewhere on the front page of DD.
It could be big enough to maybe show the 1st 2 or 3 posts in a board. The only spots I see that I may be able to put it are on the left hand side right below the “join the duck on facebook” link. Or on the right side to replace the “The Duck on Twitter” section. As it looks VERY outdated anyway so it wouldn't be damaging anything wowio may consider useful. It looks like it's not picking up the new tweets from twitter at all.

So replacing it with a window into the forum may be more useful for us and it'd look similar to a shout box. If I can do it and Ozone doesn't mind.

Stickies could just be combined for the most relevant. The really active stickies may not even need to be stickies themselves. I mean they are always going to be near the top anyway. Another idea for condensing the # of stickies is to make a portal sticky. Basically it'd be a thread that would lead to other threads that had been stickied

And I guess I can see your point in not mixing the “spam”.
Meet, Greet, Show and Tell
The Marketplace
Combine those 2 as you had originally said? And the community projects can merge with Comic talk? Either that or comic talk should just be mixed in with the regular discussion boards. Keep in mind I'm trying to keep people having reasons to go to each board and check them frequently so we need pull power for each board. I say this because the logical thought is that community projects don't need to be mixed in with normal comic discussions. You know how much I feel community projects are important.

But right now having them mixed to help people come into the boards and check them frequently would be better IMO

How's that sounding?

JustNoPoint wrote:
Another thing I want to look into doing is possibly adding an iframe somewhere on the front page of DD.
It could be big enough to maybe show the 1st 2 or 3 posts in a board. The only spots I see that I may be able to put it are on the left hand side right below the “join the duck on facebook” link. Or on the right side to replace the “The Duck on Twitter” section. As it looks VERY outdated anyway so it wouldn't be damaging anything wowio may consider useful. It looks like it's not picking up the new tweets from twitter at all.

So replacing it with a window into the forum may be more useful for us and it'd look similar to a shout box. If I can do it and Ozone doesn't mind.

Ooh, I think that's a great idea! imo replacing the Twitter would be a big deal at all.

Combine those 2 as you had originally said? And the community projects can merge with Comic talk? Either that or comic talk should just be mixed in with the regular discussion boards. Keep in mind I'm trying to keep people having reasons to go to each board and check them frequently so we need pull power for each board. I say this because the logical thought is that community projects don't need to be mixed in with normal comic discussions. You know how much I feel community projects are important.

Yeah, I think either of those would work actually! I don't really have a preference one way or the other. It kind of makes sense to combine comic discussions with other ones, but I can also see it being cool to have projects mixed in with general comic discussion.

Stickies could just be combined for the most relevant. The really active stickies may not even need to be stickies themselves. I mean they are always going to be near the top anyway. Another idea for condensing the # of stickies is to make a portal sticky. Basically it'd be a thread that would lead to other threads that had been stickied

Maybe looking at this could be a next step after condensing the sub-forums, if there do turn out to be too many stickies? I kind of want to see what everything would look like first.

Meant to say that replacing the twitter widget would *not* be a big deal. (Too much of a hassle to edit a post with quotes, haha.)

Yeah we can deal with stickies after the restructure.
For the iframe thing I need to also be able to make sure it displays on the posts themselves.
I found a site that explains how I might do that.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14117763/how-do-you-put-only-a-certain-section-of-a-website-into-an-iframe

If I can't figure it out though it won't be worth it. Guess we can still think of SOMETHING that could go there if it doesn't work though. *inserts an ad for my own comic in that spot till then as a placeholder while laughing maniacally

I wouldn't mind having a spot where I could promote whatever community project is currently going on! I sometimes stick a community project in the first slot on the top ten, but I think that's confusing for people. They're also not always comics. It wouldn't have to be very complicated - just a space where I could put an image and a link.

Interesting.
All good sugestions so far! :D

@oz: Any thoughts on whether comic discussions should be lumped in with general discussion or with community projects?

With General I would say- this is a comics site afterall, so it seems right that it'd be a topic for general discussion.

Cool! Well if no one has any objections, I might make some changes Thursday night and post about it in Friday's newspost to see if people want to offer any feedback.

Very good idea to condense things. Kudos!

I went and had a look at comic tips and tricks, and holy moly there are a lot of stickies. So I think I'm going to implement a stickies-specific subforum after all.

Okey dokey, slept through my alarm and missed my morning classes so I went ahead and made the changes.

WOW! Good job Hippie!

Thanks! ^_^

And of course thanks to JNP for the suggestions.