Subtopics

The new subtopics look good for the most part.  The one that does bug me though, is the combined electrical/DCC topic.  I remember when I thought a forum for electronics, wiring, electrical and DCC was a good idea...at another forum.  I still think it's a good idea but without the DCC being included.  It seems that the electrical/wiring/electronics gets dwarfed and buried by the, "which DCC system should I buy" threads, or the "I want to argue about MRC decoders" threads, etc.  From my perspective DCC needs a topic all it's own with electrical/wiring/electronics, DC cab control, lighting etc. being another topic without the DCC thrown in.

But that's just my two cent's, opinions will vary.

You may be right ...

Kevin:

You may be right ... let's see how the threads develop. If it turns out "what DCC system should I buy?" threads do in fact overwhelm the other threads, it's easy enough to stand up a new DCC topic.

Once we get more traffic in these new areas, we can adjust them as needed.

And be assured, making changes on here won't be like pulling teeth ... if our readers think we need to make a change, we'll make it - no biggie.

Time will tell

I agree, wait and see how things develop.  I for one do appreciate the way change seems to be embraced rather than avoided over here at MRH!

I like it, now you just need

I like it, now you just need the moderators to actively move the topics out of general discussion to the appropriate subforum - one, to keep the topics organized, and two, to get people used to thinking longer then "OMG I Have this Problem it REALLY is just a DCC quesiton BUT  I'm Posting it in the General Forum Beause I'm paniced and Nobody goes down there anyway!!!"

A thought.

I tend to think less is good

I tend to think less fragmentation is good. I wonder if already there are too many sub forums? I never saw much purpose in sorting posts into bins anyway. Inevitably forums end up with a few active forums and a number of relatively dead ones. Posts can be moved around by admins but why make the work?

I think it should be less about "I dont want peanut butter in my chocolate" and more about  ensuring that the sub-forums are big enough that they are always active but not too small such that new posts end up on page four in a few days..

I hate to admit it.. but I think MRR got that part right.. keeping it to a few very active forums with rather broad subjects rather then a bunch of little forums..

Just my 2 cents, worth every penny.

Chris

Does it really matter?

When it comes to reading posts on here, most people use recent posts - so you could put your post just about anywhere and people will find it.

So I don't think it matters that much. If it's a problem for you when posting, just throw it in general discussion - the posting police won't come get you ...

It really doesn't matter...

I've been thinking about this and reading what others have to say.  I have come to this conclusion, which contradicts what I thought originally.

Having many and varied sub-topics is pretty well pointless.  Users invariably post in the wrong sub-topic a lot of the time, so unless there are moderators who spend most of their time acting as electronic filing clerks it's a jumble of threads at the end of the day anyway.

I think it may be the nature of the online forum to be a mish mash.  If you want the utmost of organization... I guess the library is still out there.

Even the library misfiles things now and then

There is a saying in law practice - "worrying about exceptions makes bad law".

The point is for every common situation that exists you can think of exceptions. In fact, once you get started down the path of envisioning exceptions, they can become ever more bizarre and edge-case in nature. If you start trying to make rules to account for every conceivable exception, the result is the 99% cases are now a total nightmare.

In this case we have a half-dozen or so simple categories - and if you're not sure, post it in general discussion. We're not going to lose any sleep over it, and we're certainly NOT going to waste a lot of time recategorizing posts unless they're so clearly out of whack that they need moved.

With the recent posts feature of this site, you can find the new stuff easily enough no matter where it got posted. And if you're really hurting, go type your topic in the search box.

By having some basic categories, the person who wants to peruse "locos and rolling stock" for example, can get some interesting locos and rolling stock threads quite easily. Will they get all the threads that could conceivably have anything at all to do with locos? No. But then throwing everything into one big bucket doesn't solve their problem - it only makes it so now they *always* have to do a search even for the obvious posts that cover their topic of interest.

So the occassional post in a wrong category DOES NOT invalidate some basic subsections. That's trying to use the exeception to make the rules - and as we know from law circles, rules made to account primarily for the exceptions are just bad rules.

Distinct forums are a great

Distinct forums are a great help though if you are looking for an article and you are dead certain it appeared in one category - or you can search one category at a time, which does not overwhealm the search engine, though searching all ten forums [or one forum with 10,000 posts] would.

Think about organizaiton in terms of libraries.  The bookstore model works well when you just want to browse for something fun to read, but when you are specifically looking for one little byte of data, the library model really does excel.