Perhaps it is time to chance the structure of this forum? I know this has come up a few times in the past, and the owners and moderators of the forum have been quick to say that they like it the way it is.

While I sympathize with the fear of spreading too few users too thin (by creating too many sub forums), it seems to me that the EJ forum has been growing by leaps and bounds lately.

I love the forum and the crowd that posts here, and the no-nonsense attitude of the moderators. I am not so keen, on the other hand, on digging through 48 pages of old posts to find the latest ones in a thread. If a few sub forums was opened, confining relatively broad areas of conversation to single threads might no longer be required.

As an example: A 5vs5 thread where all discussion pertaining to the subject is supposed to go, will without any shred of doubt grow to a point where it is a hassle to navigate. A lot of people are interested in PvP these days, I would imagine a sub forum would get a healthy amount of users.

At the very least I would divide the board into theorycraft, pve, pvp. These are very broad definitions which supports a lot of ground.

So, that was my 2 cents.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a second.

The problem with splitting the forums up, is that a lot of the traffic is 'seasonal' (not your traditional seasons, but patch related etc) - so some of the forums would just not get a worthwhile amount of traffic.

I agree with your point about a PvP forum, but see below.

Saying that, if people want to put in some thoughtful and cohesive forum structure suggestions, we'll be happy to listen.

I would agree that a PvP forum would get a bit of use. It's a pretty broad subject that generally shares less with general discussion than some other things, and one that either is or isn't of interest to specific users.

I would also think that a Encounter Information/Discussion/Strategy Forum would be useful. It would give people a place to go first the first stop if they need to look and ask for information, without having to search through some rather unwieldy, often long, wide-ranging and/or buried, threads. And as a popular topic I think it would manage to still keep an active crowd.

My two cents.

a pvp forum to discuss builds, gear, strategies and so on would be really appreciated

Certainly a concern, I agree, too many forks are far from ideal for a lot of reasons. I am happy you will at least entertain the idea of splitting out a separate PvP forum, which was the main idea which got me posting in the first place.

EJ has a very high standard on posters, particularly in the fields of theory crafting and endgame raiding. The amount of posts regarding PvP, while increasing lately, has been lacking. I believe this is because EJ "looks and feels" a lot like a PvE board.

By giving avid PvP players a segment of their own to post in, you will attract more players which see little reason to frequent "raid boards", in addition to cater to the PvP players that already post here.

As a side effect it will also free up space on the "general" board, and so allow people to split discussions into new threads more often. I refuse to believe that I am the only person reluctant to follow discussions spread over a 40 page thread, which may or may not be so old that the start of the thread is no longer relevant to what is being discussed twoards the end.

From my point of view it would be sufficient to just make a "Player vs Player" board and then rename "Public Discussion" to something appropriate for PvE.

I really like having all of the news/encounter/raid content on one forum. Splintering any of it seems counter-intuitive to me. PvP having its own forum makes a great deal of sense, though.

Well, a quick survey of the EJ forums shows that the threads fall into several categories.


1) Class concerns - theorycrafting and itemisation
2) PvP - discussions on team makeup, tactics etc.
3) Raiding theorycrafting - tactics, group makeup
4) Previews of upcoming content - PTR material
5) Crafting - quite a lot of overlap with class concerns on itemisation

Right now, (1) is the only one that has its own forum, and it's a bit of a melange of different areas. Discussion of itemisation is split awkwardly over all the different forums. Not all these areas have enough traffic to drive a forum section, obviously.

I'd be tempted to recommend the following split.

A) PvP
B) Class / Individual discussions
C) Raid / Group discussions
D) Future content previews

Most discussion of itemisation, crafting etc. addresses how you can best advance your individual toon and thus would sit more easily in the class theorycrafting forum

Discussions of raid group politics, setup, tactics etc. fit into a forum of their own - how do you advance the *group* by getting individuals to work together

Splitting off discussions of future content is really a no-brainer. Yes, traffic there would be very seasonal, but it's very frustrating trying to look up details of current itemisation, suggested specs etc. if it's all buried in discussions of what's *going* to be the best idea in a month and a half's time.

Special paid for accounts, long-ass threads, heavy moderation... what does that remind me of?

Also I would like to add that a PVP subforum would be something I'd like to see. I've been looking and can't find a good PVP forum anywhere (if anyone knows one let me know :P), an EJ PVP forum would be perfect if it got the same amount of traffic as the more raid inclined forums.

Sorry worldofming already has the pvp scene covered.

*performs ninja vanish jitsu*

They are goons afterall.

Probably the other best forum on the internet from which EJ sprang in the first place. 10 bucks is completely trivial and for the amount of work that this forum saves me and the interesting things that people learn it's well worth it to me.

Yeah I have no problem ponying up to help forums I visit, actually I think I'm probably too ready to pay. Please don't tell the ones that don't have payment options. :P

There is website run by HappyMinti at

www.shadow-gaming.com

which is exclusively focused on PvP. I don't know if it's heavily moderated like the EJ forums, but at least the idiots from worldofming don't seem to have found it yet. It has some interesting articles as well.

Being a benefactor adds years to your life.

Its true!

Also marvel at the wonder that is hellsoap.

Don't bring up hellsoap here, you'll scare them away.

This is hilarious. Now I know why I got 5 donations this morning.

As an aside, the Benefactors forum is only 1 forum with a decidedly more chill tone than the public forums. That's it. I mean we discuss lots of stuff in there, like coffee and teaching DeeNogger how to kill Kazzak. The main point of donations is that this server costs $100/month and realistically, we need to either add another or step up the hardware in this one.

It gets pretty expensive pretty fast. I suppose we could always join Uberguilds or install a bunch of Adsense.

Conversely, we're always open to well-thought out posts regarding our forum structure. It seems to me that, in retrospect, we had wished we created a TBC subforum for discussion. Maybe it would be helpful to have a centralized place for the discussion of upcoming content.

I too would love to see a PvP forum on EJ

<shameless-plug>
While we're mentioning other PvP forums (Ming's Blog and Shadow Gaming are both rather rogue specific), I have to plug the site I run, Subcreation:
http://forums.subcreation.net/

It started with the Mage forum linked off my sticky in the official forum, but it's grown to encompass more since then.

My style is that I like lots of forums and lots of threads, and moderate somewhat less harshly than EJ (since we're small, I edit and tell people how to improve ... this is a luxury EJ probably can't afford given its size). That said, I have no tolerance for WoW forum kiddies a la Ming's comments. We have a pretty active PvP 5v5 and 3v3 theorycraft section ("Intelligent PvP and Arena Discussion") as well, given our size (1351 registered users as of right now).
</shameless-plug>

*continues to dream that someday, somewhere, someone will put up forum architecture that lets readers choose whether to display the forums as a flat conglomeration of threads or a nicely structured set of sub-forums*

This can be done with tagging and a proper user interface for organizing based on what tags a thread carries... thing is there either has to be a really good method for autotagging, or the thread posters will have to be good about applying appropriate tags.

http://elitistjerks.com/external.php?type=RSS2

Not sure if it's possible, but when a user starts a post have them select a catagory and a sub catagory. While the new post will go into the general forum like usual it will be tagged into a specific "section" that is invisible to users. Then, under the search function, you can select to display only topics tagged as "Hunter" or "PvP" or both.

Hmmm... someone needs to write a yahoo widget to track that. :] (I'm hardly able to myself.)