Community

It's time to look at reorganizing the forums.

Back in April, Wrecan opened up a thread to kick around different organizational ideas. That thread generated a host of good ideas. We took those, melded them with our own, and churned out what you see below.

This is not a final outline—it's a starting point for you to offer more feedback. We want to combine and streamline wherever possible, with the aim of making it easier to find the type of conversation you want. With that as a guiding principle, we've pared down to this outline. I'd like to get it even smaller, but we don't want to be so vicious that no one recognizes the place.

A few explanatory notes and questions we'd really like feedback on:

What's a Player to Do? is a prime candidate for folding into 4E General Discussion. It's kept separate here because WaPtD is fairly busy, and we don't want to overload 4E General. That doesn't alter the fact that those two forums have a lot of overlap.

Astrid's Parlor is folded into 4E General. AP was strong for a while, but its traffic has fallen and we feel its audience would be best served by joining the main forum.

There was discussion of combining the D&D and M:tG off-topic areas into a single forum outside the brand categories; they're off-topic, after all. For now, though, we've kept the OTT as-is.

We considered combining all of the D&D Previous Editions forums into a single Vintage forum, since some of them don't get much use, but decided instead to separate by worlds.

• Looking to Play D&D?     
  • Organized Play
  • Living Forgotten Realms
  • RPG Gamer Classifieds
  • Play-by-Post (including the Virtual Table)
  • Core Coliseum
• D&D Community     
  • 4E General Discussion (combines Astrid's Parlor)
  • 4E Rules Q&A
  • What's a Player to Do?
  • Character Development
  • 4E Character Mechanics (combines Strikers, Controllers, Defenders, Leaders, Multiclassing and Rituals, Equipment & Magic Items)
  • 4E Character Optimization
  • What's a DM to Do? (combines Races and Monsters and Combat, Traps, Terrain, and Tactics)
  • Off-Topic Tavern
• Campaigns     
  • Homebrew Campaigns
  • 4E Core World
  • Forgotten Realms (combines FR General, Running the Realms, and Realmslore)
  • Eberron (combines Eberron Lore and Running Eberron)
  • Dark Sun
  • Gamma World
• D&D Products     
  • Reviews and Projections (enfolds Future Releases)
  • Errata (combines all errata forums)
  • Dragon and Dungeon online (combines Dragon/Dungeon General and Dragon/Dungeon Article Discussion)
  • Online Tools (combines DDi Announcements, DDi General, Character Builder, Monster Builder, Technical Discussion, and Digital D&D)
  • Board Games (combines Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, Legend of Drizzt, and Conquest of Nerath)
  • D&D Miniatures, Skirmish game
• D&D HQ     
  • Community Business
  • GSL
• D&D Vintage (reorganizes conversations by world rather than by rules chapter)     
  • Vintage General Discussion (for all rules discussions)
  • Birthright
  • Dragonlance
  • Greyhawk
  • Mystara
  • Planescape
  • Spelljammer
  • d20
  • Other RPGs

• I assume the "Looking to Play D&D" forums will actually be links to those areas?  Or are we creating new forums to be the repository and directory to other areas?
• Will Character Development, 4E Character Mechanics, and 4E Character Optimization be subforums of What's a Player to Do?  (I hope you say "yes"). 
• Move What's a DM to Do? above What's a Player to Do?, like it is now.
• "Campaigns" should be "D&D Campaigns" just for consistency.
• Move 4e General Discussion to the bottom of D&D Community
• Move Off-Topic Tavern to the bottom of D&D HQ
• I disagree with Seeker that "Vintage General Discussion" should be renamed.  While rules would be discussed there, it's not the only thing that would be discussed there.  I assume, for example, that house rules could be discussed there, as well as table management issues, or locations to find out-of-print items.
• Think about renaming "Reviews and Projections".  I have already twice mistakenly read "Reviews and Rejections".  How about "Previews, Reviews, and Requests"?

Oct 6, 2011 -- 11:47AM, wrecan wrote:

• I assume the "Looking to Play D&D" forums will actually be links to those areas?  Or are we creating new forums to be the repository and directory to other areas?

I'll echo this question - the Core Coliseum (and most/all of the other PbP groups in my sig) could benefit greatly from having a spot in the forums again - but I definitely don't want to move from being a group (we lost a lot of people from all of the forum reorgs, reconstructions and moves - I don't want to move again and lose what small community I have).

Oct 6, 2011 -- 1:03PM, Mr_Miscellany wrote:

Question: Will a re-org involve thread deletion? More to the point: if the three Realms forums are rolled into one, will that necesitate deletion of all threads from those three forums; deletion of some; no deletion?

Thanks for taking the time to work on this Huscarl and Co.

Thats really needs to be answered escpially sicne oyur planning to roll of the d20 forums into one,instead of just leaving them alone

Oct 6, 2011 -- 3:55PM, Huscarl wrote:

We won't be deleting any threads, AFAIK. We should be able to combine forums without losing anything. The last thing we want is a reprise of the d20 fiasco from a few years ago.  

Then i suggest leaving the d20 forums as they are instead of combining them