Suggested forum revamp

Right, so I've been looking at the forum setup so far, and it's very testing in terms of navigability. There are too many forums spread across too much forum space, making it hard to check up on every post made in every forum, and annoying to boot. Here is my suggested new setup for forums, which should hopefully make things easier to navigate (including subforums):


Special Forums:


The Lounge - DOESN'T EXIST


Court of Appeal - things


Administration:


Announcements - Would cover both forum and site announcements, special tag to mirror to front page or manual mirror could be instated


Suggestions & Feedback - On its own, single forum, no subforums


Main:


The Projects - Site project discussion. Right at the top to signify importance


General Discussion - Discussion of community/general Sonic


Sonic Specific ROM Modding - This would be set up interestingly. Basically, the "showroom" would be a part of the main forum, while questions & answers simply remains a subforum. There's no reason for two subforums, however


Archive - Self explanatory. Holds all the important tidbits of hacking info. Subforums will hold the relevant game info (even if I feel this is unnecessary), but also...


--Subforum: Submissions. This would hold submissions for all databases. Topics would be prefixed with the relevant database to submit to, to avoid 15 more subforums (seriously, fuck subforums)


Others:


Everything Else - Self explanatory; the introductions forum would be merged into this, since a dedicated forum is wasteful and unnecessary


Shits & Giggles - Nuff said =P


Emulation Discussion - Basically a rename of the "Discussion" forum in the rom modding section. Basically, you're opening it for some actual discussion to take place. =P


General ROM Modding - nuff said. The primary focus of the board is Sonic ROM hacking, so everything else is an extra


Trash - Because everyone needs a rubbish bin somewhere =P


I think this setup would be much easier to navigate, as well as put emphasis on the forums that matter. This is a Sonic forum, and should be treated as such; at the same time, off-topic discussion should not be discouraged, just placed where it belongs. I admit I sort of based the setup over what I liked from Retro's forum setup, but that's because it's the only forum I've found the easiest to navigate in the whole community.


In addition, I want to propose enabling guest viewing for the main forums. Currently, SSRG offers no incentive or benefit from joining--you see nothing about what it contains, and it's therefore brushed aside. Embrace your guests so they want to join--don't force them to! That's a very important thing to keep in mind.


I do hope this is taken into serious consideration. This should seriously help attract attention to this forum, encourage more posting, and make it easier to read posts on the board. Our goal is to get SSRG known and accessible by its target audience, and I think this is an excellent way to do so.


Thanks for reading!

 

Actually, this layout isn't half bad. I'm for this idea.

 

It's always good to have a layout change once in a while, I like it.

 

I agree entirely. In fact I've been thinking for a while that Everything Else and Shit and Giggles could be merged into a nice "Lounge" forum at the very least. Very nice to see you put a lot of thought into it Tweaker, I mean that layout is pretty much ready to pick up and use. I wonder if it will be adopted!

 

SeanieB, did you have to double post?

I keep meaning to put you in there =P

Not bad at all. I think we should take up on this idea, as see if we like it. If not, we can either change it back or tweak it a bit to our liking.

 

I just hope Ordos takes a look at this, there's also the slight issue of the fact that this server could go down at any moment according to the host, but Ordos hasn't been online so I haven't been able to let him know =/

 

I'm liking tweak's plan and the forum. But Qjimbo why would the server go down for?

 

The server could go down at anytime, as this shares the same server as RetroHack, and we've stopped paying for that (and started paying for a new one), due to the server being messed around with by the people we bought it from.

 

A skin suggestion -- I would suggest to go with either a dark theme or a light theme -- the star background is okay and all but currently the "foreground" other than the logo doesn't compliment the background that well.


I could come up with some colour designs that would be likely keeping a simular design to this one -- it'd be still keeping the silverish design but just fixing the colours of what isn't the silver bars, just allowing the background to compliment the design better.