Expanded Forums for Expanded Discussion

[NoSex]

What thought, if any, has been given to the idea of expanding the forums? The community seems to be pretty strong actually (there aren't too many active members, and those who are active seem to know one another). For me, the moment I got onto the forums I wanted to start to make connections and get to know people better. However, I realized that that would, more or less, require me to read back because this place seems to move at a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race sort of pace. If more specialized forums, outside of just "General Discussion" were formed, perhaps this could spark more specific, varied, and frequent discussion: music, debate, television, et cetera?

I understand that this forums' main focus is on film (which I support wholly, ha), but I think the community and the vitality of the forums would greatly benefit by an expansion of the major categories available to its members.

[cagedwisdom]

I would love to see more activity around here, but my experience is that when a forum is excessively expanded before it should be it ends up feeling more empty and ultimately more dead..

Still, do it right and I'm all for it.

[Quicky]

I would love to see more activity around here, but my experience is that when a forum is excessively expanded before it should be it ends up feeling more empty and ultimately more dead..

Exactly what I was thinking as well. Adding one forum at a time when there is a known need for it is the best strategy I think.

[mpowell]

Yeah, we wanted to keep the number of forums small... there's nothing worse than a page with 393 forums which haven't been touched in months.

But, how about a new forum topic called "Introduce Yourself"? That seems like it'd be a great way to ... er, introduce yourself to the community at large. I'm sure it can be intimidating to enter into an established group like the Criticker forum users.

And of course, we encourage the creation of whatever topics you want in the General Discussion forum... a lot of the topics already there are only tenuously related to films, and that's fine.

[cagedwisdom]

An introduction forum would be great. I always appreciate the possibility to introduce myself when joining a new forum.

[paulofilmo]

I think the small forums and film exclusivity add a touch of class, to be honest. It's about film, and other things might come at a detriment to the focus.

Perhaps I'm just airing the polemic view. I'm not concrete in my thoughts, by any means.


Nevertheless, an 'Off Topic' forum might be a good start in order to gauge modal interests.

You can probably tell quite a lot from the forum goers' favourite films. I suspect SciTech, PPE (philosophy, politics, economics) might go down well. Psych, too, perhaps.

[NoSex]

An introduction forum would be great. I always appreciate the possibility to introduce myself when joining a new forum.

done and done and done and something

I definitely sympathize with a lot of points made against immediate expansion; such a move would be empty and lame. So, yeah. I think this place will naturally evolve, right?