**Possible Forum Changes - Please Read!**

Faith

Hi all,

We’d appreciate some feedback from the forums about an idea we (the mod team) are knocking around. We have noticed a global decrease in posting on boards.ie over the last while, and one reason that keeps being suggested is that there’s too many overlapping forums. In this category, we have Food & Drink, Beer & Wine & Spirits, Cakes & Bakes, Coffee & Tea, Cooking & Recipes (excluding the Cooking Club for right now) and Snacks & Sweets.

If we were to consider having a single “Food” forum*, we could combine Food & Drink, Cakes & Bakes, Cooking & Recipes and Snacks & Sweets. This would allow us to have a single forum that covers all of the “Food” bases, and we wouldn’t need to move threads between forums constantly. We would keep The Cooking Club as a sub-forum, because to merge it would destroy it as a resource. What we’re thinking is, does it matter if you’re cooking, baking, snacking or just thinking? It’s all food, and I’m sure most of us do more than just a single food-related activity.

We don’t want to make any changes without taking community feedback on board, so we’d really appreciate it if you could give us your thoughts and feedback about the idea. Thanks!


*We’ll talk about drinks at a later date.

Tree

The only worry is that if it gets *too* busy that unread threads drop off the front page. (that happens seasonally in Gardening, and I just miss whatever is on page 2 :-/ )

Bored_lad

As Tree has said my fear would be that that threads from the smaller forums such as cakes and bakes will end up off the front page and ignored. This is worse than having a quite forum where nearly all threads get replies.

Jellybaby1

I drop in to F & D from time to time but only to go straight to C & B. I'd hate to have to search for it amongst other stuff really.

sdp

It's hard to say whats best, as you mods put such a lot of time and effort in,
I love the layout as it is, as I tend to go to cooking and recipes, and cakes and bakes only,
But if it frees up some time for mods, then I'll happily go with the flow.

Ken.

You could ask the higher ups for tags. Then a thread would be immediately identifiable.

Faith

Your concerns about threads getting a bit lost are definitely valid .

I've asked about a tagging system. If it can be done at Admin level, that's great. If not, then the chances of it ever getting done by the dev team are slim to none.

Faith

Okay, so if a tag system was implemented, whereby you can refine to threads with "Cakes and Bakes" as a tag, while the threads still exist in a single larger forum, would that be agreeable?

Tree

Can you make the front page default longer too?

Faith

No, unfortunately that's beyond our control

Bored_lad

I think tags may work assuming that 1. Tags are made mandatory when submitting a post and 2. Tags and someway to filter tags is implemented to the mobile site. However, I don't see how this is going to increase posts in Cakes and Bakes or how it will cause less work for the mods.