Please reduce the number of forums!!

You've got a beautiful domain name like cms-forum.org and you're totally wasting it. Seriously, isn't this stuff obvious?

1) The forums are *way* too numerous and specific. Reduce it three or fewer like (if you want *lots* of forums) like "General Discussion", "Choosing, Installing, and Running a CMS Yourself" and "CMS Products and Services (Whore Yourself Here)"... seruously, you have over thirty forums and 90% of them don't have a single post.

The questions I have don't belong in *any* of your catagories. No one who went into those catagories would care about my post (because it would be off topic) and no one who wanted to see my post would ever see the title (because why click on the forum you're not interested in)?

This very post is a perfect example... it has practically nothing to do with "Blogs", and should go in the general discussion area... the general discussion area that doesn't exist :-(

2) Once your *handful* of forums start to get *crowded* then you break out one or two new forums and refocus the original forums based on the broad, non-overlapping, themes that seem to come up.

Somehow I doubt it will be along the lines you've already carved out. Probably it will be flame wars that interupt productive conversations between a handful of CMS partisans... phpBBers who want to talk about phpBB having their threads hijacked by Geeklog people who say their whole paradigm sucks... or maybe "get the job done and earn my money" folks getting interupted by "open source revolutionaries" (or whatever).

This stuff is tricky to get right, especially when you don't even know what kind of user base you'll attract (IE determining your demographic appeal and optimizing for that kind of crowd from first principles). The only safe way to find out how to do it is to let it happen naturally by having a few forums until things *must* change to accomodate growth. In the meantime you want the best possible network effects: value increases with the square of the interacting participants, not linearly.

Which do you want:

Forum1 (2 people) = 4
Forum2 (1 Person) = 1
Forum3 (3 people) = 9 +
--------------------------
Grand Total = 14

OR

Forum1 (6 people) = 36

Easy decision right? Take down the barriers between the users so they can see each other until the crowd gets so big that people leave because they can't find the right signal (rather than there being no signal).

3) Permit anonymous posting. If someone posts total garbage anonymously and you don't like it, delete the post! It's not like you have hundreds of users to police. In the meantime your barrier to entry (going through the trouble of signing up) is too high relative to the services you offer (ie you offer nothing, because you don't have any users or posts, catch-22). Anonymous posting generates content you can use to bootstrap the community with.

I just logged in because I'm still hunting for a forum full of people who want to start a site and share my interest in starting with something that I'm not going to regret in the future. I'm pretty sure Slashcode is several "blogging software generations" old and difficult to use (and in perl if I want to submit patches or mods... ugh), but it will also get the job done and I don't know of anything else that's stable, secure, and will scale to hundreds of thousands of users (which is the goal I have for my site). Where do you ask these kinds of questions? At a CMS overview forum, right? Except they all seem to suck because they're micromanaged in the wrong ways.

So I'm hoping this fourm will get twiddled around and end up sucking less for those who come after me. In the meantime I guess I'll just stumble along on my own.

Good luck.

-Some Random Person