board77

Hello peeps

After careful consideration (*ahem*andforgettingaboutthisforacoupleofdays*ahem* ), I've compiled a list of options for consolidation of the B77 fora.

Now that the membership is split between several boards, and/or are burned out from messageboard burnout, our traffic has diminished considerably, and B77 feels like a huge house with lots of empty rooms. yova suggested consolidating some of the less-visited fora into a smaller, more user-friendly board, and people posted several suggestions.

EDIT - New options added, and poll added. Feel free to ignore the old options, which I'm editing in a smaller type, but leaving in this post for reference.

Please read all the options, and choose one that you like.
We'll go with the most popular option, even if it wins by one vote. If there's a draw, the rangers will decide among themselves which option to go for, taking into consideration people's feelings as much as possible (i.e., the rangers won't choose the least voted-for option).

NEW Options for the Poll:

Option A (Modified from Option 6)

Welcome Forum
* Info forum / Welcome
* Business Room

The Round Table
* The Turf
* The Symposium
* There & Back Again...
* Made in Dale
* m77t and geek
* The Members' Lounge
* Thinking of England

Dicisne hoc opus artem esse?
* Literary rambles
* Vidistine nuper imagines moventes bonas? + La Camerata

Outside
* The BikeRacks + The Jury Room
* The Archives
* Threads of Historical Interest

Board Management
* Forum management
* Sensitive Information
* Deleted threads storage
* Michel Delving
* Sensitive Info Mayor


Option B
Leave as is


Option C
* Welcome
* Turf
* Symp
* RP
* M77t&geek
* Private
* TOE

* Board Management stuff... including Business, Bikeracks, Jury, whatever





Old options:

***

Option 1

Vidistine nuper imagines moventes bonas? (Movies) + La Camerata (Music) + Literary rambles + Made in Dale (Games) = Arts & Ents (spot the Tolkien ref? )
Jury Room + Bikeracks = The Bikeracks (because the name is fetching )

Option 2

Vidistine...(Movies) + La Camerata (Music) + Literary rambles + Hall of Fire + Made in Dale (Games)= Arts & Hobbits
Jury Room + Bikeracks = The Bikeracks

Option 3

There & Back Again + Made in Dale (Games) = 1 forum
m77t and geek + Members' Lounge = 1 private forum
Hall of Fire + Literary rambles = 1 Literature forum
Vidistine...(Movies) + La Camerata (Music) = 1 forum
Jury Room + Bikeracks = The Bikeracks

Option 4

m77t and geek + Members' Lounge = 1 private forum
Hall of Fire + Literary rambles = 1 Literature forum
Vidistine...(Movies) + La Camerata (Music) + Made in Dale (Games) = 1 forum
Jury Room + Bikeracks = The Bikeracks

Option 5

Not touching anything and leaving everything as it is.

***

Jnyusa suggested merging the three "members only" fora, m77t and geek, Members' Lounge and Thinking of England, but ToE has given us enough headaches so I think we should leave it well alone, at least for now.

And I'll leave the merging of fora like Archives and Threads of Historical Interest to a future Ranger, if this consolidation works ok and people feel like doing more of it.

I like Option 1.

I like option 4, except that I'm not sure if Made in Dale belongs together with Movies and Music. Still think it's the best one, though, since the mixing of There & Back Again and Made in Dale (option 3) seems a bit strange to me. But I hardly ever use those forums, so...

I don't think Movies/Music and Literature (Tolkien and others) should mix.

I think Hall of Fire is the most difficult. By rights it should be carefully split into Movies, Books and Games so that each thread is in the right fora.

I'm thinking

Option 6
There & Back Again + Literary rambles since both are basically literary in nature
m77t and geek + Members' Lounge = 1 private forum
Hall of Fire = Split to the relevant Fora. Movie and Music threads to that forum, games to Made in Dale and Literary discussion to that forum.
Vidistine...(Movies) + La Camerata (Music) = 1 forum
Jury Room + Bikeracks = The Bikeracks

This removes 5 Fora while leaving the structure more or less intact. It should result in the index page being visible without scrolling.

If necessary, Option 7 could add the following:
Made in Dale could be dropped into Turf, since its essentially a "fun" forum.

Alatar

I think Alatar's suggestion has merit actually. Although, I would stick the lit forum with the movies/music to make it arts and entertainment, since the writing forum has RP characters who are only allowed to post there.

Al, the only problem I foresee with your suggestion is that the RP characters are restricted to There & Back Again - I don't know how we could keep it that way if we merge T&BA with any other, open, forum.

Alatar wrote:

Made in Dale could be dropped into Turf, since its essentially a "fun" forum.

I think that's a good idea.

Suggestion with a bit of copy and paste from option 4:

Made in Dale --> Turf
m77t and geek + Members' Lounge = 1 private forum
Hall of Fire + Literary rambles = 1 Literature forum
Vidistine...(Movies) + La Camerata (Music) = 1 forum
Jury Room + Bikeracks = The Bikeracks

There & Back Again: Left alone.

Any more opinions? Or should we just go ahead and start consolidating?

I thought Ber was consolidating. Maybe I'm mistaken?

Well, I think all the Rangers will probably be involved.

But I could be mistaken too.

Why are people so quiet over this matter? Come on, guys - say something!

Maybe there's a conspiracy? Actually, I do remember Ber saying something about going ahead with things, but I forget what she said. I had assumed that she was in the process of doing it. Obviously, I might be mistaken.

I get the impression Ber is pretty busy with RL at the minute. She's mentioned exam marking in a few threads.

Well, I hope she or anyone else isn't getting the impression that I'm trying to rush her or whoever. Just stating what I think I might know.

I’m starting to have second thoughts about some of this. The only parts that make any sense to me are combining the music and movie forums and the literature and Tolkien forums, but that’s only because those forums are so small and contain so few threads to begin with. Combining music and movies, for instance, would mean a forum that has six pages of threads, as opposed to two forums that have five and two pages respectively. Same thing for literature and Tolkien.

But, Turf has 30 pages of threads, and just dumping all of the Made In Dale threads in there would effectively mean relegating most of them to the dust bin of history. Keep in mind that when you move a thread to a different forum, its placement in that forum depends on the date of the last post. So, most of the Made In Dale threads will end up somewhere behind page five, or lower. Most likely, no one will ever see them again.

Combining the Members Lounge and M77t and Geek makes sense from the point of view that they are both restricted access forums. But beyond that, I don’t know what good it does. The whole point of this was to facilitate more participation in the discussions. I’m not sure how putting the m00t threads in with the personal threads will help to do that. It seems like it would mostly make it more difficult to find the thread you’re looking for!

There And Back should stay the way it is, because of what Ber pointed out - the restricted access for RP characters.

Bike Racks and Jury Room can go together, or not. It doesn’t make any difference to me. It’s not like we’re trying to facilitate discussion in either one of those forums!

I don’t know. I’ll happily go along with whatever the group wants to do here, and I’ll help in any way I can. I don’t mind doing the legwork for this, and if Ber is busy than I’m glad to help out. In fact, I recall someone mentioning in the Turf thread about this that we can always move the threads back to their old forums if we don’t like the new arrangement. If it will help, I can go in and save each of the forum index pages as PDF files so we have a record of what went where. That’s probably not a bad idea, whatever we decide to do, is it?

Another thing that I’m almost hesitant to bring up, but, does anyone think it would help to send out a global email to all of the members to try to get some more input on this?

I dont see a need for it. The kind of "if it ain't broke , dont fix it " issue for me.

I looked at some of the combination suggestions and to tell truth, in each one I cringed a bit at least at one pairing. I like that theyre separate and clear with the topics. I dont think there's too many of them, really.
This is not some huge issue to me, but I dont see a need to tinker with a set up that is clear and specific. I like it.

Of course, Im generally not a fan of change

Carry on

Send out a global email if you like tinwe.

I suppose dumping anything in turf would be impractical. I think archives, bike racks and jury can all go together just because they are never used.

It's all about a little change around here, enchie.

I would be happy with option 4 or 6.

I also didn't know that this thread was here until two minutes ago.

When will consolidation start?

(Given that the turf thread came out in the affirmative, I assume we're doing something...)

We could start phasing it in immediately. It seems that everyone is agreed on combining Movies and Music into one forum, and Bikerack and JuryRoom into another, so why not just do those initially and see how it works? We can do the others if we think it's working ok.

The only one that requires much work would be splitting out HoF into its component threads, but I don't mind doing that, if we agree on it.

I'm really sorry guys, bad case of RL here - work and family issues. I'll try to get back to this on Wednesday but right now I can't concentrate on anything.