Do People Like Boards with A LOT of Forums?

[magnus]

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

[Rapscallion]

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