The Great Forum Shuffle conversation

[Brock Beauchamp]

Lots of forums. So many forums. All the forums. I just ran through the list and gave my quick thoughts. Please feel free to comment/debate anything said or not said here, this was literally four minutes with me quick-firing thoughts as a place to start the conversation.

 

North Side Baseball

Cubs - keep, obvi

General Baseball - keep

Game Threads Forum - The only suggestion I have here is to start the game threads in the Cubs forum and archive them here the next morning

Minor Leagues - keep, obvi

Amateur Baseball - it feels like this could probably be done a little differently with topics moving to transactions or MiLB or a specific draft forum

Front Page Articles - stays with new system

Insider’s - explain what this is about, please

Transactions - Brewer Fanatic has this, Twins Daily does not; my slight preference is to roll this into the Cubs forum but convince me otherwise

Polls - Roll as much of this into other relevant forums as possible, why is there a forum for only polls?

Site Suggestions - stays but moves to a different category

 

Fantasy Sports

General Fantasy - stays, maybe move it to the category below this one

A bunch more that are inactive

 

Non-Baseball Talk

Other Sports - stays

Social - what is different about this than rants?

Rants - what is different about this than social?

Sim Baseball - merge into fantasy, inactive

 

Guest Chats

All empty, eliminate

 

NSBB Activities

Events - stays but will likely move to a different category

Honors - empty, merge

FAQ - empty, merge

 

My goal is to eliminate inactive forums and merge somewhat like-minded forums together. Condensing categories is kinda necessary. If a list of categories grows too long, the lower forums become ghost towns as people stop scrolling.

 

Ultimately, I could see the categories working as such:

 

Baseball Forums

Miscellaneous Forums

Other Sports Forums

Staff and Site Questions Forums

 

With most of the above forums being in one of these four categories.

[Sammy Sofa]

why is there a forum for only polls?

 

This never made sense to me; like, why not just create the poll in the appropriate forum?

 

As it stands, there's really not a huge difference between "social" and "rants." "Social" is used far more; "Rants" mostly gets play when people want to gripe about some kind of "this really grinds my gears" problem in their lives, but even then that often just ends up posted in "Social."

 

I think it would make sense to just have a big "Non-Sports" forum, and then a few subforums within that along the lines of broad topics I mentioned: general chit-chat, politics, food, movies, music, travel (obviously people should sound off with what else they think fits along those lines; can't imagine we'd need too many). I think having a "serious topics" forum would be a good idea; we do get a fair share of posts where people are venting or want advice about something serious happening to them, and keeping that in an area where it would be obvious anyone entering that this was a "cut the bull horsefeathers" forum would help everyone.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Asking for input is weak behavior. Make the changes unilaterally and establish dominance.

[Andy]

Insider’s - explain what this is about, please

Aw crap, he found it

 

Insider's has no real purpose anymore, it can be dumped.

[WrigleyField 22]

What you've generally laid out sounds good to me.

 

I don't have answers as to why some of these things like rants got split out. I'm sure long ago with much different activity levels it ended up making sense, and just hasn't been updated in ages.

[Irrelevant Dude]

A few of my thoughts:

 

1. Amateur Baseball - Maybe this just be consolidated into Minor Leagues? The Amateur Baseball subforum is essentially nothing more than an annual draft thread, which would seem to fit in with an expanded Minor League forum.

2. Transactions - I could go either way on this one and can't really make a great argument for keeping it separate.

3. Social & Rants - I think Rants was intended as a place to complain and express personal opinions about anything that comes to mind, where Social has somewhat more structured discussions on various topics. Yeah, Rants could probably be considered Social, but do we want them cluttering up the other more relevant threads?

[sweetpeteman]

A lot of these come from a time when the forum was busier and needed more separation/organization. A pruning has probably been needed. I mostly browse using Active Topics/Unread Posts anyways.

 

 

For me:

 

North Side Baseball

Cubs -

General Baseball -

Game Threads Forum - as long as Fred's name stays on it, or maybe a FredBot to start the game threads.

Minor Leagues & Amateur Baseball - these don't get a ton of use individually and could probably be merged

 

Fantasy Sports

General Fantasy

Sim Baseball

 

Non-Baseball Talk

Other Sports - stays

Social - merge in rants

Events

Forum Support

 

 

Elminate:

Guest Chats

Insider’s - Back when the board had more people, it was a place for long time members to post privately... aka bitch about new members. not really used anymore, but could still be liked as a place for more personal posts that some people may not want seen by non-members or newer members.

Transactions - just post in Cubs/General discussion

Polls - no need for an individual forum

Edited February 28, 2023 by sweetpeteman

[UMFan83]

Insider’s - explain what this is about, please

Aw crap, he found it

 

Insider's has no real purpose anymore, it can be dumped.

 

Disagree, every forum needs a cool kids club (as long as I'm in it)

[UMFan83]

why is there a forum for only polls?

 

This never made sense to me; like, why not just create the poll in the appropriate forum?

 

I always thought it was there because the board was at one point obsessed with creating large tournaments for best bands, best posters and hottest chicks (Vance [-( ) and it was bogging down the social forum.

[Outshined_One]

Amateur Baseball is used to discuss two things: (1) MLB Draft-related items; and (2) College Baseball. It's not as active as it used to be for #2, but it made sense to have a place to discuss things like the College World Series, the Cape Cod League, etc. since we had a number of posters who would actively follow college baseball teams/players, but not necessarily contribute to draft discussions.

 

If I remember correctly, Rants came about as an off-shoot to Social because a number of threads were getting hijacked into off-topic discussions in Social, so it gave a place for people to vent and blow off steam while keeping other threads in Social on-topic.

[CubColtPacer]

Transactions is a hard one. It is really only needed as its own forum for certain periods of the year, but when it's needed it's really needed. In November and December when rumors are flying and teams are actively signing players, it is really helpful in having that in one place rather than having the rest of baseball in one forum and the Cubs in another. Same thing for July before the trade deadline. It was even more helpful before mega threads were common, but even now it's very nice to be able to go to the forum and see threads for all the players who have been signed with a glance and then go into the rumors threads after that.

[WrigleyField 22]

Transactions is a hard one. It is really only needed as its own forum for certain periods of the year, but when it's needed it's really needed. In November and December when rumors are flying and teams are actively signing players, it is really helpful in having that in one place rather than having the rest of baseball in one forum and the Cubs in another. Same thing for July before the trade deadline. It was even more helpful before mega threads were common, but even now it's very nice to be able to go to the forum and see threads for all the players who have been signed with a glance and then go into the rumors threads after that.

Yea I don't know how practical it is on the backend, but I go to a Bears board that has experimented with merging 2 or 3 boards (Bears, other NFL, Draft) in an out of the main board due to volume at different point of season / offseason. It works well but I imagine it may be a little bit of a pain.

[Bertz]

Yeah I think Transactions is the toughest call among the sports focused forums. I'd lean keeping it separate, but at the same time Cubs discussions is a ghost town during the offseason because the most natural thing to talk about are Transactions.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Transactions is a hard one. It is really only needed as its own forum for certain periods of the year, but when it's needed it's really needed. In November and December when rumors are flying and teams are actively signing players, it is really helpful in having that in one place rather than having the rest of baseball in one forum and the Cubs in another. Same thing for July before the trade deadline. It was even more helpful before mega threads were common, but even now it's very nice to be able to go to the forum and see threads for all the players who have been signed with a glance and then go into the rumors threads after that.

What about this? The way we do rumors works really well for us from a technical/SEO perspective.

 

https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/forum/6-transaction-rumors-proposals/

[Irrelevant Dude]

Transactions is a hard one. It is really only needed as its own forum for certain periods of the year, but when it's needed it's really needed. In November and December when rumors are flying and teams are actively signing players, it is really helpful in having that in one place rather than having the rest of baseball in one forum and the Cubs in another. Same thing for July before the trade deadline. It was even more helpful before mega threads were common, but even now it's very nice to be able to go to the forum and see threads for all the players who have been signed with a glance and then go into the rumors threads after that.

What about this? The way we do rumors works really well for us from a technical/SEO perspective.

 

https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/forum/6-transaction-rumors-proposals/

The "proposals" part is kind of scary. Does that mean we have to listen to everyone's wackadoo trade ideas?

[Brock Beauchamp]

The "proposals" part is kind of scary. Does that mean we have to listen to everyone's wackadoo trade ideas?

In my experience, it quarantines the whack-a-doo proposals.

 

The real upside in this forum is another section of the site that automatically creates a forum post in that forum AND it goes like gang-busters for us in SEO:

 

https://twinsdaily.com/minnesota-twins-free-agents-trade-rumors/

 

Twins Daily pulled in like 50,000 users from google/social this offseason from that section of the site alone. It's a huge boon to growing the community when we can quickly collate rumors in a place like that and google latches on to it. If you search "twins free agent rumors", these are literally the first two results:

 

[attachment=0]results.jpg[/attachment]

[Ding Dong Johnson]

Transactions is a hard one. It is really only needed as its own forum for certain periods of the year, but when it's needed it's really needed. In November and December when rumors are flying and teams are actively signing players, it is really helpful in having that in one place rather than having the rest of baseball in one forum and the Cubs in another. Same thing for July before the trade deadline. It was even more helpful before mega threads were common, but even now it's very nice to be able to go to the forum and see threads for all the players who have been signed with a glance and then go into the rumors threads after that.

What about this? The way we do rumors works really well for us from a technical/SEO perspective.

 

https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/forum/6-transaction-rumors-proposals/

The "proposals" part is kind of scary. Does that mean we have to listen to everyone's wackadoo trade ideas?

B2B will always be welcome here.

[Brock Beauchamp]

I moved a bunch of stuff around, tweaked some names for future SEO, added some descriptions, deleted empty forums. merged a couple near-empty forums.

 

We'll still make more changes but I want more people to chime in on the forums that are being used, I just wanted to clear up some screen real estate.

[Banedon]

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to do some forum re-arrangement and consolidation....but it sure does look weird!

[Brock Beauchamp]

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to do some forum re-arrangement and consolidation....but it sure does look weird!

It's always a shock to the system and for that I apologize. Everyone gets into a routine and shuffling things around is hard.

 

But I'll try to do it in as few pieces as possible. I just wanted to do a little housecleaning so my brain can sort out where the active content is a little better.

 

The end goal is to get the most active content closer to the top of the page so that's good, right?

[Brock Beauchamp]

Game Threads Forum - as long as Fred's name stays on it, or maybe a FredBot to start the game threads.

I just noticed this and I'm completely on board if it doesn't seem disrespectful. But it's not something I'll get to in short order, maybe mid-season is my best hope there.

[Ding Dong Johnson]

All of this shuffling led me to this, the true reason da bum isn’t coming back.

 

Another Fred-note - perhaps his greatest accomplishment in life is that he was that mod that banned Da Bum. That should put to rest any desire to see Da Bum return -- he should be banned forever, just how Fred wanted it.

 

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=958&start=200#p95515

[Hairyducked Idiot]

I like it already. New is always better. When do we switch over to Twins content?

[Brock Beauchamp]

When do we switch over to Twins content?

Yer all a bunch of masochists over here.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

When do we switch over to Twins content?

Yer all a bunch of masochists over here.

 

Take your time, I know you've got a lot to do.

 

I'm still scarred by the time all the Cubs fans made fun of drafting Joe Mauer because we got Mark Prior and that did not turn out the way it was supposed to.