I could care less what design these forums are. I'm here for information and nothing else.
Because I've got my own forums, (V-Bulletin) I trip around Mouse Land quite a bit just to see other examples of forums. I'm a political-news junkie. I use an ol' Pentium4 1.7 as a server in my home.
I think that the only real benefit of having tons of forums or child-forums/sub-forums is that the search feature is easier to use. As an example, I have a forum for each country as opposed to using "International News".
I look at a forum as a database. In fact, that is the only reason I chose to create my own forums. (My forums are usually not open for public viewing.) I used to collect "information" (articles and commentaries) and save the links in a Microsoft Word document. However; the document became too large to utilize properly. Plus; half the damn links to referenced stuff out there in Mouse Land became inactive after 6 months or less. In a sense, my database was self-destructing every 6 months. So, I use the V-Bulletin forum template as a database instead of a Word Document and I copy/paste complete articles. My collection is about 100 thousand articles/commentaries, about 5000 audio/visual selections, and perhaps 10 thousand PDF's and other documents. I've been collecting for about 4 or 5 years now. About 400 Gig of content. MySQL data is about 4 Gig in size.
Let me tell yuh, half jokingly, that when I visit forums like these and discuss current events, it is very easy for me to reference stuff .... I sort of have my own Google. I'm well prepared to argue any point or view being made.
I have found .... that the more forums or child-forums/sub-forums yuh have, the easier it is to use the search feature.
As an example ....
Iraq (Main Forum)
Child Forums
Current Events
Soldiers And The Military
Resistance - Insurgency
Why Did The U.S. Invade
UK Involvement
Israel Involvement
What Does Sovereignty Mean
Abu Gharib - War Crimes
To Find Colin Powell's U.N. presentation prior the invasion in 2003 ....
If I were to search the main forum for "Colin Powell" as an example, I'd probably get 1000 hits. But, if I were to search the child forum "Why Did The U.S. Invade" .... the search is more precise.
Other then that, information is just information. No big deal as to how the information is presented.
At the moment, I'm attempting to change my forum template from V-Bulletin to a Joomla Template. I believe that Joomla is the future.
http://www.joomla.org
My view anyways.
Calm
Hey! Cleft_Asunder
I should of had your nic. I was born with a cleft palate.
