Finally all caught up.
I am in agreement we need less sub-forums/consolidation. The original concept for the forums was designed for *A lot* more traffic. What the freak is March Madness?
Gameplay, tech support merge into general support. Match making is comatose, maybe change it to "Other" other gaming like dice games, ccg and the like if you don't want to kill it.
The Friend Code child boards should go away replaced by the sticky in their respective sub-forums.
Podcast and Talkback is ripe to merge although that looks likely to break the site.
NWR feedback should be a child of Announcements/rules which stay as is.
Keep the 3 game sub-forums as is.
All 3 of the community forums stay as is. You could child Mafia to the funhaus.
Reader reviews is a weird one. While it is nice having it's own space, I can't remember the last time I have gone in there for a review. If I did read a review in the it was in the "what are you playing" thread or the "Last gaming purchase".
You could re-purpose it into a writer's testing ground where people can post their reviews like they do now, but if it is good enough it gets posted on to the main site under guest reviews. If the quality goes up I might read them for fun/curiosity. if they are really good you can bring them in as staff.
There isn't enough material to make dedicated sub-forums for TV and movies. The current mega threads cover it pretty well and diluting that would just make me stop reading. Look how dead the anime thread is as an example.
Clean off some of the sticky. Why is the bloodworth thread doing at the top of the funhaus?
It should be a Khushrenada threadThe forums as they are is as they are because it is gated by the small inconvenience of signing up which I am fine with. More people coming is balanced out by the fact you are going to have to deal with a lot more low effort people making a mess. As many people Steam forums, GameFAQ and the like has, it is bedlam.
The number of people we have here is a direct result to the traffic the main site gets. No amount of shuffling the forums or social engineering is going to change that. You want more forum members while keeping the quality of the community we have here? Get more site traffic while maintaining the quality of content as people will self select into the forums based on it.
One thing that
might help site traffic but can take up a fair bit of work is doing short regular top#/list video regularly with a Nintendo related focus. People like them as it is bite sized chunks of very digestible information. It doesn't even have to be information, just Top # ways to die in mostly Nintendo video games. Please choose an arbitrary number other than 10 or don't have a fixed number at all for maximum flexibility.
A quick and dirty thing you can do is to export all the current podcasts onto youtube. Once you have done that for your future *casts you can have spilt screen talking heads if done live or add some related information on screen post edit. You can still have your podcast in audio files etc just that now you will have a much wider audience that you can filter to the site instead of hoping they will come to you randomly like I did because Big N got popular.
You have plenty of content on the main site, just very little visibility now days since you rely directly on Nintendo to be visible so directly. The primary problem NWR has is marketing, not content.
How did I miss this thread?
Make the forums great again! I vote in favor of consolidation.
*Visibly unsheathe knife.*