Thoughts on consolidating the forum?

[The Dharma Bum]

Just make one category and call it stuff 'n' stuff

[Bauce]

Entertainments and sports can also be absorbed into the lounge.

[spacemonkey]

Put all the ones you were going to end into one pile. Just call it recycle pile, the junk pile, or whatever.

[The Dharma Bum]

Really, you should structure your topic categories according to your SEO strategy.

That is the purpose of having various named categories in a hierarchical structure. It's so search engines can spider and categorize your pages on their engines. If you consolidate too much you won't have anything they can work with.

BTW I noticed we have been getting spidered by Baidu. Hopefully that will result in some interesting traffic.

[Stratego]

Can we have a "turn on sub-forum" in the settings with a default set to "off?" If you have it off all the topics would just appear in the general forum. But if you turn it on, you can more finely define where your thread would go.

[eric]

This is how it should be organized:

Front Page Discussion <---- Latest/newest events, maybe mod/certain contributor specific
General Discussion <---- Discussion for all topics, past, present, abortion/religion, etc...
Philosophy <--- discussion not related to current events, but just thought, no OP link or anything required
International <---- News/topics that may not be related to America
The Lounge <---- all the entertainment/science rolled into one
Q&A <---- all the three bottom sub forums rolled into one

Also I suppose you could work that "VIP" stuff in somewhere.

It probably doesn't seem like a lot of forums, but that's the point. In order to get people engaged in different discussion you have to have a variety of topics and force people to see those topics in different forums. We also aren't even close to needing this many sub forums we have now. Make people talk about latest tech developments, sports, and Breaking Bad or whatever in the lounge along with talking about cool beer or getting hit by a car or whatever. I haven't really been checking the entertainment sub forum because the last couple times I did, it was just a techno music and Breaking Bad circle jerk. Which is fine and everything, but it keeps me from possibly seeing a thread I'm interested in based on the perception of what goes on in that forum. Having that stuff in the lounge, I can avoid it still, but still can see the good threads and maybe it'll get me to participate in something else.

Q&A/ feedback, obviously those three should be in one sub forum.

thoughts?

[The Dharma Bum]

Most view the "see active" so the subforums are irrelevant to them. The categories exist because specific is better than general when it comes to indexing relevant content for search engines.

"Front page discussion" is not a good search term.

"Political-crossfire.com/current issues/philosophy/what is social science" ,for example, is much more likely to help a search engine give someone a relevant result, because it is much more specific about the information contained within the content.

[eric]

Yeah I don't think it really matters what a search engine comes up with. Nobody is googling topics on this site. So that's not a good reason.

Also, the names could be whatever.

[The Dharma Bum]

Search engines being able to identify and present relevant results to the user is all that matters about a website.

[The Dharma Bum]

http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=political-crossfire.com