**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.

chuckles30

I'm only a sometime visitor - it really depends on how much free time I have, but I think one food forum would be a great idea as everything would be in the same place. It might encourage more discussion too as I'm sure I'm not the only one who has regular sections they visit.

But obviously the regular visitors would be in a better position to comment....

squonk

To me the way things are makes a lot of sense. I mostly visit the Food & Drink forum, followed by Cooking and Recipes however I rarely look at the other sub forums. I find Food & Drink is a good catch all and I'm not that interested in having my fed cluttred up with some of the topics from the other forums. For me I think it would be a step backwards. I think there is a pretty strong and vibrant community here already. It's one of the stronger forums in terms of activity based on those I visit.

I think the bigger issue for the lack of traffic to Boards is the usability of the site itself since the the DoS attack. I now have problems logging in at times and also a fear at other times that my contribution won't end up getting posted because the session has timed out. I think these factors would discourage many. That being said, I wouldn't move away for now as I like the posters on this forum. Everybody is friendly and very knowledgeable and it's a great resource.

fiddlechic

I think very sensible idea.

Food and Drink only bit of boards I check in on, and tend to only look at my followed threads, as clicking on other forums a bit tiresome (not to sound too woe-is-me!)

If all in one, I think quite easy to visit.

rubadub

If they are in a general forum I would only be worried about negative comments about certain things, which might put people off posting. e.g. bargain alerts is a general forum, if someone posts a bargain for coke or chocolate you inevitably get posts about diabetes and obesity etc. So if the snack forum was in general food I would expect the same.

Beer & coffee people could expect to be called snobs etc. Though I think the forum attracts less whingers so maybe there will be no issue.

In bargain alerts there are prefixes you can select for threads, this has fallen out of use. So when you start a thread you can select "groceries", "electricals" "travel" etc, this then appears in the thread title. Maybe there could be "recipe" "snacks" etc. It could make it easier to see, and you are not forced to use it -which is good as I am sometimes undecided which forum to post in.

Faith

fiddlechic wrote: »

Food and Drink only bit of boards I check in on, and tend to only look at my followed threads, as clicking on other forums a bit tiresome (not to sound too woe-is-me!)

Well, a lot of complaints these days are about the extra clicks that boards now forces on us. So I do think we'd increase traffic and the community by having everything together. People don't have to read the threads they're not interested in, naturally . As it is, I doubt everyone reads every single thread in a forum - I'm sure they pick and choose based on interest. The proposed changes wouldn't affect that approach - there would just be more choice.

I've asked about a tag system to see how easy it would be to implement.

Faith

Thanks for all of the feedback, everyone! We'll be moving forward with this imminently .