Forum organization revisited

[Irrelevant Dude]

A year or so out from the initial site relaunch, is it time to rethink the main forum categories again?

• Chicago Cubs Talk - The most popular Cubs-related category, but the way it is being used has made some of the other categories redundant
• Cubs Minor League Talk - Still makes sense as its own category
• North Side Baseball Front Page News - I get that there needs to be a place for articles to go, but some of them end up in Cubs Talk and some go in Front Page News.  What is the difference?  There is probably a simple answer, but I don't know what it is.  Why not have all articles consolidated into one single forum, wherever that may be?
• Transaction Rumors & Proposals - Seems pointless since everyone keeps posting all transaction-related news in other threads in Cubs Talk.  I liked the old Transactions forum where we would see threads created for any meaningful transactions and that made it easy to follow what was going on. Now a lot of the transactions are getting buried inside other threads. I guess this isn't a news site, so maybe that's fine, but I still think something has been lost there.
• MLB Draft, International Signings, Amateur Baseball - Mostly used around draft time, but I think it is fine
• General Baseball Talk - This used to be the place for all non-Cubs talk, but many of those posts are ending up in Cubs Talk now. I do still prefer having this separate forum for anything not Cubs, if people would use it that way.

When I started typing out this thread I expected to have more complaints, but I guess they can mostly be consolidated down to the tendency for current posters to post everything inside large "catch-all" threads, and often in game threads as well (during the season).  A lack of proper organization for transaction posts and the frequent mixing of Cubs/non-Cubs news are another variation of that same behavior.  Maybe it is all working the way it is supposed to work for SEO purposes, and maybe (almost certainly) I'm too set in my ways, but I miss the days of more structured content.  This might not be a forum structure issue at all and instead relates more to user behavior.  That is probably hard to change outside of consistent heavy-handed moderating, which I'm not sure anyone wants to do or has time to do.

So... what, if anything, can we do to make things better while still meeting the SEO requirements to maintain a healthy site?

[UMFan83]

One thing I will say is that even though I’m generally on team mega thread, I find it interesting that even though there was a stated desire to end mega threads, we still ended up with virtually all offseason talk in one thread (Cubs offseason thread). The one place I preferred not having mega threads was the Transactions forum as it made sense to have separate topics for each rumor or transaction so things didn’t get lost in the shuffle which is kind of what is happening now.

[Brock Beauchamp]

@Irrelevant Dude and @UMFan83:

Thanks for the input.

The front page news forum is so that the Cubs forum isn't overwhelmed with article threads. As the site grows and content grows, we will start moving all article threads into the front page news forum (they currently generate in the Cubs forum and I manually move them after a few days). We do it this way to create engagement with the articles as a bridge to the site/community growing.

I think you're right about the transactions forum. I will look into changing this up in the near future. I'll move the rumors to the Cubs forum and we'll create a specific transactions forum if that's what people prefer.

I decided to give up on the war against megathreads for the time being. But the war is not over, this is def a calculated retreat for now.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

Would it make sense to move General Baseball Talk to the 2nd or 3rd position among baseball forums?  Feels like it ends up below the fold on my screens and the others above it don't get as much use(or are very seasonal, like the draft), so would help avoid too much thread consolidation from being out of sight and out of mind.