Do People Like Boards with A LOT of Forums?
 

Do you prefer boards with a lot of forums and categories, or a smaller number of forums?

For example, if you have an off-topic section on your board, do you like to see a separate forum for Music, Sports, Television, Books, etc...or just "General Discussion"?

Smaller number. I hate it cluttered.

People like busy forums. If a forum gets too busy, then it should be divided into more forums.

I started with 4 forums. Now I have 190.

Bigger the site, more sections, I say.

start small then go big ... no one likes an 'empty' site

Exactly. Start with Basic, solid sections, then branch off later.

There's nothing better than knowing when you visit a board with scores of forums that you'll have a bruised and battered finger with excess scrolling. Personally, I love the whole ruff and tumble of it all.

Unless a forum is active with a lot of forums I don't mind to much if the content is beneficial to my needs. If someone (and I've seen it many times) creates like a billion forums whilst starting out on a new board I'll turn away.

Depends how popular the forum is. Is it brand new and those forums are empty? Then I don't particular like that nor do a lot of people. Is it a busy forum where all the forums are relatively full? Then that's fine.

Def start small. No one likes heaps of empty forums.

As long as you can keep the active, the more forums the better.

Nothing worse than a site full of inactive forums, except maybe forums locked out to guests!

-Raymond

If your site warrants a multitude of forums, sure. Most don't. So, no.

I'd agree with the majority of what has been said. Keep an eye on what's going on and review it from time to time. Add what seems logical and remove what isn't working. As an example, I have a section where my members can complain about dumb customers in a technical customer service arena, but due to the number of posts requesting help from the techies I added a subforum for technical help questions (you can bet I put some solid disclaimers in that one...). I also polled the members first to see if they were willing to help in there.

I also have two main divisions. One is core content (the category is 'heart of the site') and the other is 'community' (all the off topic gear). I have a rule about this - the community stuff is just as important as the rest, but I don't allow it to overshadow what's in the main section. If I have five forums there at the top level of the category, I'll make sure I have more in the main section. Subforums can make this very easy to work.

Back when I was getting about 350-400 posts a day, I had about eight main forums (one for classic posts for a 'best of' section, so mod posting only). I now have ten and an extra four subforums that I can think of off the top of my head, and I'm getting approximately 550-600 posts a day. The community stuff has held steady - added an item or two, moved one or two sections to the core that were blatantly more core than they were originally.

I actually had someone copy my site once. Forum software, same skin, rules copied word for word with just a few names changed etc. He wanted to go into some sort of business deal with me - he was even spamming myspace etc and offered monetary prizes for the best poster for the first couple of months. I looked him up on WHOIS and sent him a birthday card - it had a badge on the front that he could wear, with Scooby Doo wishing him a happy sixth birthday. Anyway, he'd added so many exta forums that were irrelevant that it sounded really, really hollow. It didn't help when his advertising for money prizes ended and he got (still does) about a dozen posts a month or so. Damn, I can hear the echoes every time I go there.

I also think long and hard about any extra forum. I've noticed that I've got many animal lovers on mine and am thinking about a subforum for pets. If I want to taunt my moderating staff, I mention that I should start a gyno subforum for female members only (I'm not serious about this one).

Rapscallion