[Red5]

Another popular gaming forum, the STGN board, a link can be found at www.armadafleetcommand.com and then message board has a great forum!!!!!! its almost as good as this one

They have about 3 times as much forums though or whatever but they organize em in a different way...

The main page doesnt show all the forum rooms, it shows a main room like Game hosting, Game chat, Game modding

In these sub rooms they have other sub rooms like hosted sites forums...

I just think its a neater way to organize things, maybe itd work here too

[StratComm]

No.  Subforums = bad = slow death of a community.  I actually prefer having everything lumped into one forum or having a few large ones than a bunch of super-specific ones; they tend to be distracting and they are certain to reduce the number of times any given post is seen.  If you are going to do subforums at all, listing them all on the same page as HLP does is the only way to go as far as I'm concerned.

[Shrike]

Indeed.  I prefer a small number of large forums to the inverse.

[WMCoolmon]

It's all about balance. If you only have a few forums but lots of posters, things are hard to keep track of because every second something is changed.
On the other hand, if you have lots of small forums, people have a hard time keeping track of the posts because they have to check every forum with new posts for a topic of interest.
HLP is in the middle; on average, I check 3-5 forums per visit which have fairly specific descriptions. I can quickly scroll down the list of campaigns and see if any progress has been made, since if something new comes up there'll probably be a new post or two.

The forums are fine as they are, and unless a new project is started or the community's population jumps dramatically, I don't see a need for more forums.

[Stealth]

i like the way on the main forums page that they have the 'top posters' and the 'top posters of the day'...

i guess that would encourage spam though

[Sandwich]

Actually, although you probably didn't notice it, HLP does use sub-forums like you were describing.

The layout is like this:

• Hard Light Productions
     
  
     
  • Hard Light
       
  • Hard Light Art
       
  
  
• Freespace
     
  
     
  • General Freespace
       
  • The Source Code Project
       
  • Freespace Modding
       
  • Squad War
       
  
  
• Independance War
     
  
     
  • Independence War 2 (and I-War)
       
  • Independence War modding
       
  
  
• Hosted
     
  
     
  • {all the hosted forums}
       
  
  
• Private

   

   
• {all the private forums}
     

[/list]


You can also see this in the location bar (the line with all the ">" symbols between the sections) up above.