really i'v never seen it. hmmm

either way it would still be nice

I like the way this forum is quite unorganized; you never know what you will read next. I do think a good case could be made for a section advertising games. The advent of live games has meant that these posts take over the forum some times.

It's nice how this suggestion pops up every now and then...
Personally, I like the forum as it is, and I think organising it would spoil some of its beauty. Even posts advertising games are nice to see in the middle of the other discussions.

No, no, that is a very bad idea. I am veteran on the Internet, and I have seen lots of forums being destroyed by 'over organizing'. You might have a separate place for joining games (okay), but from experience, an over-organized forum is far far far far far worse than an under-organized forum.

It there were multiple pages of posts, then there might be a problem, but as it is now, all the new posts are almost always on the first page. And it is easy to scan past the posts that are of no interest to me. So I'm happy with the status quo.

DJ - to be fair it hasn't come up in quite some time has it.

I had this idea and the verdict was "We are bizarrely attached to our craptastic forum organization."

I will admit, this forum's "organization" threw me at first. But I have grown to like it. I must be weird, but I now find it kind of organized, in a strange sort of way.

It does become rather endearing doesn't it

Figles,
I wasn't saying 'You are a stupid idiot for bring this up.' Merely pointing it out.

Yeh I know, I didn't word my response at all well - I didn't mean to imply you were!
I was merely trying to comment (partially out of surprise myself) that it hadn't turned up for so long, especially with the number of live-game threads.

I will say that there are two things I would like to see in the forum. The ability to ignore a thread (and not see it) and a search function.

Ditto on a search function.

Hmm, ignore would be an interesting one. Not too hard to do though. The thing I'd quite like to see done / do if I can get ahead enough on my degree (so summer holidays!) would be to AJAXify the forum, as I think it would significantly cut loading times, and make it an all-round neater place.

i mostly jsut get tired of all the Live Game action

2 forum "tabs" one for discussion and another one for game ads would be nice IMHO.

It would be nice to have a universal search, where you can have one search box which will search the entire site for:

Threads
Games (New, Open, Active, Finished)
Users
Rules
etc.

Then it would just display the search in those categories.

like one main forum for those who like it liek this and then a button to click that will sort all the types?

I'd really like a solution to this which doesn't fragment things so much that it divides us up and reduces activity, fits into what we use here (e.g. the home page forum preview column), keeps things efficient, and isn't too much work to implement

I am open to improving the forum, with the unread icons getting more fine-grained so they point out which individual threads you haven't read (this wasn't added until a few months ago) and the star showing which threads you've participated in, so I'm not reluctant to change things, it's just hard to balance the goals of a change above

Perhaps some sort of "ignore-thread" button which stops you seeing a thread again, or creating a different space altogether to advertise new games, rather than trying to split the forum into the traditional "off-topic"/"introductions"/"debates" etc style which I think might take the buzz/activity out of the forum a bit

Or maybe letting users tag their threads as being in this or that category, and then people can click buttons at the top which select which categories they want to view

Just thinking out load, using a dedicated forum like phpBB is another possible solution but as it says in the FAQ there are some drawbacks and I couldn't really dedicate the time to pull it off right at the moment. Other sites use different solutions and none of them are ideal

I don't like the idea of multiple forums, I would prefer color coded threads according to topic like stated:

New Games
Debates
Fun
Misc
etc.

Also the ignore thread button is a really good idea.

maybe creating a way for you to click a button to follow a certain thread. and it shows those threads first. also i like the idea of the ignore thread

Yeah like a forum, and then separate preferred threads column.

Oli - I'm quite happy/interested in talking to you about a possible implementation of this on your site. If you're interested give me a buzz here/there or PM.
Kestas: would you consider adding a PM notification into the notices bar please?

It's a bit sad if interesting threads got buried in half a day with live-game announcements.
If a thread leave the first page it's dead. So maybe two forum-tabs at the top, one for game announcements and one for discussion should be enough to keep some more discussions going.
Or maybe "All" - "Discussion" - "Game announcements" with the "All" tab for the view like it's now and the other two to separate the threads. And if you create a new thread you have to choose between "Discussion" and "Game announcements".

@Sleepcap

I think what you described above would be perfect.

Where would you put this thread in the new organization??

Sleepcap is smart!!

discussions probably