How about a review forum ?

[omoneru]

Not a bad idea, but it's a bit problematic in practice.

I've managed relatively large Internet boards before, and I know that one of the tricks to keep community boards active is to avoid over-segmentation of forum structure. Over-segmentation creates two problems -- topic overlapping and dispersion.

That is, if you make too many forums and divide up the community too much, thread topics will start overlapping more and more across forums. If you rigorously try to avoid overlapping, discussions instead will get too dispersed across the board, making each forum less active.

Before you make a new forum, you need to ask if thread topics in a new forum will fairly overlap with ones in the current forums. In this case, they do. And then think if you take away all the reviews and related discussions from the existing forums, how active these forums will be -- a lot less active.

If you look at other discussion boards out there, there are literally thousands of unsuccessful boards due to this over-segmentation. Because most administrators overestimate user activity, they make too many forums, hoping that each will be filled with tons of threads and posts. Yet discussions usually get decentralized too much and their boards become stagnant overall.

There's one exception, however. You can divide up the board with many forums and can still keep the community active only when there are overwhelmingly many registered users online at any given time. This forum usually has only about 80-200 registered users online at a time, and this isn't really big enough to overcome the problems of segmentation.