Personally I don't even think we should have an off topic forum, all it does is make everyone hate eachother and causes problems. Things like politics and religion just ruin the feel of the forums, those things can get REALLY personal.  There are plenty of other sites to discuss things like that, I think the forums should just focus on games, sales, and companies.

I second that. Alternatively, Off Topic threads should not appear in the Hot Topics section, or at least there should be the option to not see them in the Hot Topics as someone else suggested.

I support Option A, along with the option to remove Off-Topic from Hot Topics (Hot Topics is the single most important thing on the site), because there are three grades of Off-Topicness that get put in together: {in-depth discussion, religion/politics}, {news and articles from around the web} and {silliness/forum games}. So those are the three forums I would like.

The best-run and most successful forums I've seen for good discussion are XKCD. They have Serious Business board for R&P, a News & Articles board for less in-dpeth discussion, and a general off-topic discussion board. It works really well and members control themselves in the stricter sections allowing more reasoned arguments and less trolling etc., while the random or nonsense stuff is confined to a more relaxed board.

how will talon add improved messaging? wall and PM posts dont recognize enter button and in PMs links or pics dont show up also for wall the space that we can see is very small how's he going to fix all that good luck

option 1 is good option 2 not so good i dont want any more forum options keep things simple theres barely any forum activity as it is nowadays to have so many smaller forums for gaming

1 thing that i would do if i was yous is in the main vgc gaming hub get rid of one column of the hot topics and add tab shortcuts for each forum section that way we can do every thing all at once on that page

another thing i would do to promote more forum activity is give out points to the thread creator for creating threads that get alot of posts and bring back that top 50 by points always being displayed in the user section that way it will be like achievements people will want to come here and create good threads and play in the PL more so to get into the top 50

"someone who creates a thread about a weapons list in some obscure fps? It is likely to just get lost under a stampede of other threads unless it has somewhere to reside, but I can also see the calls for more and more sub-forums to direct discussion in certain directions and give users different "homes"

i believe that even with specific threads these topics will always get low activity or lost

also is there the function for regular posters to add news? if not will it return too?

also about the ban reason i say get rid of the part that says the mods name still have the reason return date and link to post i believe that showing the mods name results in posters creating a bias towards a certain mod or group of mods

between the two options i liked the second one better but as i voted other let me post my idea.

...but before doing that let me explain why i liked hot topics so very very much.  because the most recent posting migrated to the top i was always aware of what is current or active and filled with conversation.  i mean, who wants to go into a dead thread...not me.  in addition, i could change what the hot topics looked at so instead of the top ten most recent postings i got the top ten most recent posting in the sony forum.  all easily accessible without having to move to a new page.  quick, easy, painless, fun!

so here is my idea.  embrace it, like really embrace it.

there would really only be one forum under which all forum posts would exist.  that forum would be ordered (just like the hot topics) in the order of what is most recent.

When a person creates a new forum topic they are required to add a little bit of information on what the topic of that posting is about.  this information would in effect label the content of the posting and  would be very simular to how our forums are currently organized.  (e.g. if i want to post an article about the status of kinect pre orders i could lable that topic to be relavant to both microsoft as well as sales.  if i wanted to post a question about dead space 2 i could label it with sony, microsoft, and gaming)  a side bonus of this would be cross functional topics would no longer get the BS posts about "you didn't post this in the right forum, blah blah blah".

now as a reader of the i can either view all forum post or if I wish filter the list to the specific labels I care to read about.  If I only want to hear things about sony and microsoft - easy peasy.

now if you want to take things one step further, allow me to add a label that allows me to assign a forum conversation to a specific game.  now when i go to gamrReview and look up a game we can add a new section.

                             Summary, Previews, News, Discussion, Screens

Where discussion takes me to a prefiltered listing of all forum topics specifically regarding that game.

so yeah, that's my two cents.

I guess the second option would be good.

It's not a good idea to make the community have less forums, just look at neogaf for example, they got very few forums and theres possibility that a really good thread will just get lost in the Forum, that's never good. I say keep it all the same, adding a few more sub forums wouldn't be a bad idea either, the more the merrier I say.

Option 2 sounds too unorganized. I like as is or option 1.

My only issue now is that we used to now show off topics in the hot topics due to there often being potentially nsfw titles etc. Can this be returned as potentially a user option?

Kitler's idea dont work, sorry. I don't want another GAF where you have a huge list of unsorted topics that makes my eyes go dizzy. Plus threads with hundreds of pages is annoying. I would lose interest. Plus it's too much to demand from most posters that they provide that info in the thread title.

I liked Makingmusic's argument to merge Sony - MS - Nintend to suppress fanboyism, but.. I really need those subforums. I can't judge from the thread title if it's a Sony or Nintendo game or product they're talking about (im talking from a Xbox and multiplatform perspective here), so I'd be clickin on many threads Im not interested in. I prefer to willingly go into the Nintendo or Sony subforums and be prepared that there's sort of "inside" discussion about games or brand related things going on there.

Splitting off-topic, I dunno. Maybe you should try that first as an experiment, to split the off-topic into sub-forums, before you change the main forums and study wether it becomes too fragmented or not.

This is almost exactly what I was going to suggest. So yeah, it's good for organization, easy and fast to use and in a sense may lower the "hive mentality" some people mentioned earlier.

It could be just a matter of marking a check-box, how is that too much? :P