For example, people are posting their self-tuned ROMs and tech support questions in the "software download" forum and wondering why they get no response. The downloads forum and is full of tech support questions. The development forums are full of tuning questions, and so on.
So, I propose the following forums:
- * General Discussion - Keep as-is
* Legal - Keep as-is
* Classifieds - Keep as-is.
* Downloads - Just a single forum.
* Tech Support - a place for questions about getting hardware and/or software to work.
* Tuning - Move all threads from the "Users/*" and "Development/*" forums here.
* Reverse Engineering - Keep this area and its sub-forums as-is.
* Hardware and Software Development - Move all of the existing posts in the "Downloads/Technical Information" and "Downloads/Development Tools" forums here. Perhaps if the words "tuning" or "logging" do not appear in the forum name, people won't post their tunes or logs here. One can hope.
It's a much shorter list, but I think that increases the probability of a new user putting their question in the right place. That will make it easier for their questions to get noticed, which in turn should make for a more productive forum overall. It also just might produce development-oriented forum with a high-enough signal-to-noise ratio to stay active.
It might be optimistic to think that separate forums for "tech support" and "tuning" could actually work, but I haven't completely lost faith in my fellow human beings.
I realize that would take some work. I volunteer to spend a few evenings moving relevant threads from the existing forums to the appropriate new forums, so we can get off to a good start. That is, if the powers-that-be (Freon? CBoles?) will set up the new forum structure of course, and allow some time to sort through things before mass-moving the existing content into the new forums.