| SciFiBoy said: er, so do you like the idea or not? come on, surely people must have thoughts on this |
I have mixed feelings on the issue.
On the one hand,
- Increasing the number of forums makes it harder for members to find interesting topics to take part in.
- Increasing the number of forums also makes it harder for us mods to keep an eye on things. As it is now, there are hundreds of forums we'll never step foot in, and some people could be using the forum for some obscure DS game to post porn or something.
However,
- Chances are anything discussed in these groups wouldn't be all that relevant to the primary topic of the site, thus at worst only Off Topic would take a big hit (which is still a very bad thing to some of us!)
- Given the nature of such groups, you'll likely have little trolling/flaming in them, given the groups would probably consist of a small group of friendly people chatting about some obscure topic they find interesting (excepting political groups, of course). On top of that, we could always institue an officer system, in which the group founder chooses officers who are able to delete posts and remove members from the group. This would at least prevent bickering and whatnot.
I'm pretty much in the middle, but I think my support for such a system stems primarily from nostalgia.
GameSpot's general forums were pretty bad, but I look back on the unions system with a certain fondness. It was basically me and several other guys hanging out in the metal unions, away from the eyes of mods. We chatted a lot about music, but also did a lot of censor bypassing, talked about roms and stuff, and did a lot of other rulebreaking. After about a year a mod finally decided to check in on our little haven, and half my members were banned while I was given a warning for not keeping things in line lol.
Ah, the good ol' days.
