ZOMBIE FORUMS

I'm all for consolidation in this manner. The forums seem too much like a vacant ghost house will all of the lonely boards floating around.

lovely, it's done!

i must say, i am enjoying the reign of our new overlords.

It's beautiful!

Fancy. Much better organized.

Here's a controversial proposal. How about pruning general discussion of threads that hasn't been posted in for over, say a year. Pruned threads could then be moved to a locked forum where they can be ignored forevermore.

Advantages: general discussion doesn't look like a bloated sack of shit that needs to be split. New topics could be started for old subjects.
Disadvantages: general discussion looks empty because of the lack of people posting. People won't be able to complain about how the old thread should've been necroed to rehash the topic.

sounds good vass, do it.

I think it's generally a good idea as it removes bloat, and if anyone really wants to link a topic they can still do so.

Using the search function to see if it's already been posted about makes sense, though.

I don't know, I like being able to necro relevant threads if something pertinent appears.

However, what I do support doing is combining all the dead webcomics forums into one (with possible sub-forums) to remove all the shite at the bottom of the index.

It's never really seemed like that much of a problem for me. I mean, older threads naturally get shuffled behind the first page anyway.

Unless you're talking about moving them to a forum that no one can see, in which case, that is a terrible idea, due to searching reasons.

If you're worried about people necroing threads, you could just put a time limit on them that auto-locks them after a year, or something.

That sounds more reasonable to me.

I'd go with this one, too; merging the forums should be a last resort, as a lot of the threads would lose their context.

Also, it's probably worth mentioning that I also support doing away with the fuckton of dead forums towards the bottom. Either merge them together, or maybe even make it so that the locked forums are automatically collapsed, if that's even possible. Seems pointless for so many forums to take up so much space on the front page when they're no longer even relevant.

how about putting all that shit in a separate archive with a better search engine and linking to it?

This is true, but still leaves the problem of general discussion looking like a bloated sack of shit.


They'd probably get dropped in a locked forum along with all the dead post something threads. Doing that would make searching neither easier nor harder.


Is that even possible? Having had a brief poke around in the admin panel, it seems to me that moving threads would have to be done manually, pruning deletes the thread entirely (goodbye last thread in sockhead >.>) nothing noticeable for autolocking either.


It is possible, it's used on comic genesis, which also uses phpbb. Will probably have to badger kyhm about it.


That would work too, but at that point we may as well dump the entire current database into that and start with a blank slate. Convincing kyhm would be an uphill battle.

You know... this really is a temporary setup while waiting for phpbb3. Those forums at the bottom were originally supposed to be subforums, which take up much less space.

Kyhm said he can have the category collapsed by default by the 31st at the latest, which should solve the problem.



If you're not willing to wait for that, I could temporarily set up an open usergroup that anyone can join and set those forums visible to members only.

Seriously, a lot of these threads might as well not even exist if you merged the forums they belonged to. Hiding forums by default but still leaving them easily accessible in some way is better.

"might as well"
way to take a simple solution and turn it into a problem.

just dump everything but ~10 pages of unrelated and the creative works forums (which should be divided again, the merging is a big fucking mess) into the archive and get it over with.

we dont need any of that shit. no one is looking at it. get it out of my face.

Done. New option "hide by default" when editing a category, which will cause the category to be hidden until the user clicks on it.

shmexy!

now all we need are some users. Any ideas?