I personally don't use the forums for non-gaming discussions, so I have no real opinion on the 1st option. The 2nd option sounds more complicated that it needs to be. It would be great if you could bring back different coloured fonts for different gaming systems. That is a great way to organize forums.

the only suggestion i have is a forum for games. since we have most wanted the mods can know what are the most hyped games for people on the forum. so why not make, so hence in that forum for games their can be a section where you can post threads about a specific game like metroid, or gran turismo talking about the details of the upcoming games or when the game actually release you can ask questions form a clan, or you can discuss your experience in the game(yes their will be spoilers) ...... if at any time one of those sections has no activity you can delete it, and posibly put an other section where people can ask questions about other games, and to make that whole forum smaller, instead of putting for example gran turismo 5, gran tursimo psp you can make a whole section for all mario games, all cod games, all assasins creed games, all star wars games.....

i think that this idea will make some people spend more time on the forum, and instead of having flame wars btw selnor and bhr they could be actually discussing games, thats something which we didnt see on this site.

ofcourse it needs lots of work so i dont see it happening anytime soon, but its still a dream! official threads arent enough and they arent organised, even though they are great.

ps: it will also solidify the idea that this site isnt only sales, and that when people say a game will be huge they don't mean how many units it will sell.

@zgamer5

I think that can just be covered by having a single thread for each game made by users and posting news in that whenever it appears.

Option 1 sounds nice, but I don't really discuss anything else besides gaming here. Option 2 just sounds too complicated to implement, an easier solution would be to allow users to select in Settings from what forums the Hot Topic threads will be.

Complicating the forums is never a good thing.  The popularity of hot topics is a sign of this, as were the complaints over the fragmented layout of VGChartz proper when 3.0 first hit.  It makes it hard to find your way around, and it leads to less people browsing each individual forum, thus interesting topics are less likely to be seen and discussed.

Rather than breaking the forums apart, I would actually propose consolidating the forums into five main boards:

• Gaming Discussion - Where you talk all about the games, regardless of platform or company allegiance!
• Sales Discussion - Where you talk about the sales and market trends of all games and platforms.
• Website Discussion - Discuss the current and future state of the website.
• Online Discussion - Limited access forum where you form clans and stuff.
• Off Topic Discussion - Where you talk about anything that wouldn't fit under another forum.
• Hot Topics - Consolidates the five main boards.  Though would this still be needed?

I am under the opinion that splitting the forums into groups based on company encourages a large fanboy population on each board, and thus is a bad thing.

GameSpot is a perfect example of this.  You enter the PS3 board over there, and it's nothing but Sony fanboys praising their favorite console and shouting down anybody who suggests even the slightest criticism.   Each board is an ant hill of fanboys, with System Wars being a battle royale between each camp.  Sites like IGN and GameTrailers are almost as bad.

We're not anywhere close to their level, but we have had some complaints of this already.  I feel splitting the boards up even more will only lead to the various camps entrenching themselves in their preferred forums, creating a hive mind mentality that limits discussion in each board (especially if we add a permissions systems that would limit people to certain boards).  And look at the way things are currently - I doubt we'd have silly threads like "Join the Sony Army!" if we didn't have a Sony board.

On the other hand, a site like neogaf seems to have few issues with this (save when it comes to numbers, but that's because NPD likes to stir the pot).  They toss everything into one forum, and this leads to more people commenting on whatever interests them.  The fanboys and trolls are inevitably banned, or simply leave because they're annoyed by too many people criticizing their console of choice.  Or maybe some come to realize that the other consoles *aren't* that bad.  It's like integration in the 1960s!  I kid, but anyway, it leads to more well-rounded discussion, where people are more likely to discuss the pros and cons of a subject without fear of getting shouted down by fanboys.

I'm a guy that's been on a lot of forums in my day.  Gaf works.  GS/IGN/GT - hell, even highdefdigest.com - don't work.  We're still in the middle, but I fear us becoming like GameSpot. 

^^ I like his idea.

Only thing I would add is maybe allowing the user control over what forums topics get displayed in Hot Topics. Give us a bit of control (say check boxes) of what forums will show up under Hot Topics, ie Sales discussion, gaming, etc

I'd also like different colors to return to the forums (like blue for Nintendo, red for Sony...) like Mojo mentioned - not like writing in colors for posts.

also, the highlighted thread function that indicated whether somone had quoted/replied to you was a really nice feature, it's be really nice if it returned.

btw, voted for option 1

great, considering the online forum doesn't have much activity it can possibly take over.

let me help you with that, before 3.0 came threads in the hot topic section had colors, also news hard colors, yellow threads or news titles were for games which were multiplats or news talking about all companies, red threads or news titles were for sony products or consoles, blue was for nintendo and green for ms.

I remember on the old site on the main page there was always the top 20 or so forum topics. Nintendo was blue, Sony wasd red, and Microsoft was green. Now everything is green. The different colours are a nice, easy way to sort the topics. Is this what is coming back?