Forums vs sub forums: what’s too many?

[Ranger375]

I run a forum with around 20k members and I’ve been debating how to go about consolidating the individual forums for years lol. The majority of my members despise subforums, in large part because of the extra clicking to get there. I thought about just removing subforums all together, but wonder if that becomes overwhelming for the users or has any other effects I’m not taking into consideration. If I did break it out it would probably be like 35 individual forums broken out by category. Thoughts?

 

[Mendalla]

Seems like a lot but I am someone who prefers forums and categories to having a lot of sub forums myself. I guess, if that's what you need to cover your range of topics, then that's what you need. I can see there being a breakpoint where there's too many forums, but I am not sure what that is, especially given the ability to group and expand/collapse the list using categories. One thing I tend to look at is whether a particular topic generates enough posts and threads on its own to merit a separate forum and if not, is there a forum on a "broader heading" where it would fit. Similarly, if a specific topic gets a lot of discussion in a broader forum, then maybe that's one that you can break out. For instance, on my religion forums, I broke "Worship" out of the general "Church Life" forum since a lot of the discussion in Church Life seemed to revolve around that subject. However, if it doesn't get the traffic I expect, I might roll it back in (though right now, Worship gets almost all the traffic and Church Life has kind of fizzled).

 

[Mr Lucky]

I try to avoid subforums.

One way round iyt is to use prefixes within the forums. Although you can filter prefixes by clicking on them in the thread title, I d=find useful to have a prefix menu above the forum, e.g.




So in this case there is one forum for videos that are sortable by genre

At some stage I can easily switch to a subforum structure using batch update which can move threads based on prefixes.

The filter menu at the top I created with template edits but there is an addon by @AndyB which can do it.

 

[beerForo]

Zero subforums and yes prefixes.

 

[Mendalla]

I try to avoid subforums.

One way round iyt is to use prefixes within the forums. Although you can filter prefixes by clicking on them in the thread title, I d=find useful to have a prefix menu above the forum, e.g.

View attachment 230124


So in this case there is one forum for videos that are sortable by genre

At some stage I can easily switch to a subforum structure using batch update which can move threads based on prefixes.

The filter menu at the top I created with template edits but there is an addon by @AndyB which can do it.

Off topic, but when I was toying with starting a writing/literary board, I was going to do the genre discussion forum precisely like this (except I hadn't thought of the filter idea, which I will now use if I ever do it).

 

[Mr Lucky]

(except I hadn't thought of the filter idea, which I will now use if I ever do it).

It's odd that filters on prefixes have always worked, it's just that user would not know this intuitively - so the prefix menu is the perfect solution IMO.