Paul F. wrote:
Only other example I have is also far too old to be of use to you for demonstration purposes... the old "Accurate Shooters" forums. When there were 5 forums, it was a lively place with high traffic.
Eventually, it was spit into ten... then fifteen.. then thirty or more sub-forums. Traffic died off, users left. Eventually the place closed down.
It was shutting down about the time I started on Dealmac....

Paul F. wrote:
the three people that were interested in "post unification, pre-WWI, German cartridge arms" got their forum... and wondered where all the people went

The UnDoug wrote:
My daughter has gotten very "into" the game, "Minecraft" lately. To further enable her addiction, I started running a server on a Mac here at our house so that she and her friends could connect to it and play together. As a result, I've been spending some time at the Minecraft forums.

They are split into many, many, many sub-forums.

My thinking as to why is because there really are a ton of different things being discussed which all relate to Minecraft, but there are so many posts and discussions, that if someone is only familiar with the PC version, they are more likely to want to read posts about that version; and the same goes for the Mac version. Similarly, there are sub-forums for the X-box version, for Server Administration, for news, etc., etc., etc.

I think when a forum gets a serious amount of traffic, and the lack of separation of topics will cause some readers to lose interest because they have to see so many posts they have no interest in nor knowledge of, then it can be beneficial to split the forum up.

My thinking is that at DealMac, they put the cart before the horse. Maybe they thought that by splitting the forum up into niche areas, it would attract more visitors who would be interested in one specific thing, rather than what interested most of us who were regulars there: the mixing of refrigerator buying tip posts and RAM replacement posts.