Less sub-foruming, please

[AlkuK]

The mind likes to categorize, the Buddha did not. Please consider trimming down and elucidating the (sub)forum structure.

A merry summer to you, and thank you for the upkeep

[sunrat]

That's something that needs to be done at initial setup of the forum. To do it in an established forum with many posts would be a nightmare.
I do agree though, a lot of forums on the internet have too many subforums and it can be difficult to decide where to post a new topic at times.

[nils]

It is a very common error in community-building, especially for people organizing for the first time. Unfortunately most people start out of the first time and then the thing sticks around I created and organized successful (a few thousand people) and rather empty (around 10 people) communities and platforms since 2001 and "let's create a bunch of categories" is not helping the growth process, and especially not creating loyalty to your platform, that means people that want to come back and like the feeling of being on the platform.

Start small and centralized, create categories once a single type of topic starts to dominate.

[tseaver]

@nils

Start small and centralized, create categories once a single type of topic starts to dominate.

The LM site has been around forever in internet community years, and IIRC its current forum structure is the result of following exactly that advice.

The follow-on / corollary is that "gardening" such a long-lived site has to be done carefully, ideally by "hiding" stale / rarely-used categories from new users (with an obvious need to be able to find the old content, including a guarantee that topic URLs don't break).

[tavasti]

Plenty of sub forums does not bother me, but feature to 'block' certain sub forums would be nice. For example, I am not interested to see discussion about Muse seq (I don't use it), and people who are purists might want to ignore threads in 'Runnin non-linux software'.

[Largos]

The kvr audio forums, which also use phpbb and have far more sub forums, have a separate "latest posts" where you can customise which is like the "new posts" but is customisable so you can see which sub forums are shown. User can also customise what forums are shown to them on the front page (the rest are accessible with a show hidden link). Probably done with some extensions, I don't know.

[AlkuK]

You learn something new every day. Thanks for chipping in everyone. Pruning may not be the easiest summer job...

[logicgate]

Plenty of sub forums does not bother me, but feature to 'block' certain sub forums would be nice. For example, I am not interested to see discussion about Muse seq (I don't use it), and people who are purists might want to ignore threads in 'Runnin non-linux software'.

The capability to exclude selected sub-forums would be a useful feature.

[khz]

Plenty of sub forums does not bother me, but feature to 'block' certain sub forums would be nice. For example, I am not interested to see discussion about Muse seq (I don't use it), and people who are purists might want to ignore threads in 'Runnin non-linux software'.

The capability to exclude selected sub-forums would be a useful feature.

Is there anything available for phpBB?