Honestly I think there are way too many discussion forums now, which makes the board very unclear. My opinion is that only big zoos and those about which members write a lot should have seperate discussion forums, but zoos like Grömitz, birdpark Heiligenkirchen, birdpark Niendorf, Chemnitz, many of the hungarian zoos, or the small uk zoos about which no one has written anything yet or just one or two topics (Shaldon, Mole Hall wildlife park, Exmoor zoo ect. ) should not have their own forum.
Do you use the "New Posts" search at the top of the page? Or do you just browse through the forum topic areas? I think the new posts search is an easier way of keeping track of things myself.
Anyway, I completely understand what you are saying ... and I spent a lot of time thinking about this very issue.
In general the first rule for discussion forums is to not create more forum topics than you need - and not to have empty forum areas. That's the rule I stick to with the other forums I run.
However, as I have been spending a lot of time sorting through the existing discussion topics in the various "general" areas, I'm finding more and more discussion about a lot of these smaller zoos.
The fact is - there are a LOT of zoos out there, and as we get more and more people using the forum, there will be a lot more discussion about them all.
Interestingly, something I have already found (much to my surprise initially!) was that there has actually been an increase in discussion about these smaller zoos BECAUSE of the new forum topics. It makes people think about zoos they may have visited, or may be interested in, but had forgotten about because only the large zoos get all the discussion. It also means we should get more traffic from people searching for information about the zoos via search engines.
I'm not going to just go and create forums for every zoo in the world (although that is where we may well end up), for the moment I'm focussing on the photo gallery ... I figure that if someone has uploaded multiple photos from a zoo, then they visited there and may well be interested in discussing it more.
It is a bit of an experiment - we'll see how things go.
I am looking at investigating an alternative way of structuring things - I might try an experiment with one part of the forum to see how things go. This new version of the forum software has added the ability to choose from a set of pre-defined "prefixes" which are added to the thread title, and these prefixes can be defined for particular areas of the forum. The idea is that I'll create a set of prefixes for the names of zoos in each country and then just create a country forum topic. Anyone starting a new thread would then choose the relevant zoo name as the prefix and it would automatically add the name of the zoo to the discussion thread.
So we would just end up with one forum for each country with all threads about the zoos in that country in there, separately labelled.
The main thing I need to work out is how easy it is to then programmatically separate out the various zoo threads for display in the
Geo area.
