Split forum into subfora?

[Black]

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.

Well, that's exactly it-- you need a certain amount of traffic so all of the subfora see daily activity. A topic of interest to most with a national or international base (e.g. Howard Forums) is going to be your only shot at a successful multi-topic message board. The forum in question is a city specific forum on one topic.