Fix category ranking and cut the redundancy...

[TellingMom]

Let's be honest for a moment. The reordering of the categories was a colossal mistake. Introductions is buried near the bottom. That should be one of the first categories to encourage new members to get active. General was one of the most used categories, now barely anyone is using it. Why move this shit? If you say it's an effort to get people to use other categories, that's just plain wrong. A person who wants to sell or buy is not going to be dissuaded to look in those categories merely because General is ranked higher.

Also, there are several redundant categories. Why do we have General and Off-Topic? People post whatever in both, so it's essentially the same. Feedback and Suggestions category... again... why not just one category called "Feedback & Suggestions". Miscellaneous and Other... You guys realize they are synonyms, right?

I think most would agree the structuring is way too convoluted. Probably many categories could be removed, or merged.

I'd also like to make the suggestion of changing rule 1.15. Everyone deserves to say goodbye if they want, not just privileged ex-staff members. I know it's annoying when it clogs up the General, so make a category for it. Amend 1.15 to require all goodbye threads must be posted in said category.

 

[TellingMom]

They wanted the marketplace boards front and center because that is the primary focus of this community.

Fine, but have your meta categories even more front and center. Nearly every forum I've ever been apart of has had some sort of general first. It's the catch-all, the bread and butter. It's what gives the community personality. I guarantee that having your categories a little lower has not stopped one person from buying or selling. This is just another poorly thought out change.

 

[nara~kavi]

I agree that the General forums should just be moved back up to the top. I initially agreed with staff and other members on this decision to move it but honestly it has made me view those forums a lot less so if it's making me feel that way it's probably making everyone else feel that way too.

When I made a suggestion thread saying that there should be stickied threads on each of the Discussion category boards explaining the role or function of that specific board, staff agreed and said that they would do that. That still has not happened, so obviously people are confused and don't know the correct place to post things. I believe that splitting up the boards was a good idea, but I think that they need to be well-defined.

General Discussion should be focused on Minecraft related topics, Hobby Discussion should be for discussing other games, movies, tv-shows, etc, and Off-Topic Discussion should be for the discussion of everything else and the point of that board should be to let people engage in low-quality posting without the repercussions there'd be elsewhere on the site.

The issue is not with the splitting of the boards. The issue is that less people in general use the boards now and that the role of each of the boards is not clearly defined.

To save space, I think it'd be better if all of the Hobby Discussion, Forum Games, Off-Topic, etc, were all sub-forums of General Discussion like Hobby Discussion & Forum Games were before.

 

[Sloth]

There was a vote for General Discussion to be moved back to the top. I'm pretty sure it just got ignored though. It needs to go back up to the top.

 

[TellingMom]

I'd like to add to my suggestion to have the suggestions category removed, since it looks like staff barely looks at it.