you got to the Impulse driven forums while trying to post to the demigod forums?

It makes sense that Impulse driven would have all the impulse driven forums (that includes demigod) while demigod would only have the demigod forums and off topic sections.  To me it does anyway.   I can see how it might be confusing though.

I think your problem has more to do with the fact that it isn't easy to tell that there are other forums related to Demigod, even though they exist.  I'm not exactly sure how a simple solution can be implemented, considering that the forums are shared.

Bara

Exactly, the two forums are shared, minus the Ideas and Strategy subsections in Demigod. Maybe add a shortcut to the 2 subsections, on the impulsedriven forum, so the users who use the forum from that adress see them?

 

Have you even looked at how all of SD's forums are spread over all 12 of SD's separate forum sites?

I’m not trying to be facetious and I’m sure you know way more about SD’s forum structure than I do but in my humble opinion the problem that Dead Ghost brings up is really just the tip of the iceberg.

On the off chance you’re not totally aware of the issue last fall I went on a “walkabout” mapping the entirety of SD’s forums as they existed at that time on SD’s 11 different forums sites. It was actually quite an effort given that at that time there were 755 forums spread over the 11 different forum sites and of those 755 forums “only” 373 were unique. Of course since then a 12th forum site has been added (elemental) along with who knows how many new forums.

The thing is that if there were at least consistency in the forum structures from one site to the next then I think it all would make perfect sense. The problem is that there isn’t anything approaching consistency. Major forums with dozens of subforums and even sub-subforums on one site may exist on another site simply as a lone subforum in a totally unrelated category.

What’s even more confusing is that there are many “invisible” forums on each site. By invisible I mean that there are forums that are not listed in the sites top level category list yet new posts within that forum scroll by on that sites recent posts list. Actually there are 3 different types of “invisible” forums dependent on how you can actually determine that they exist on that site.

I could go on and write a thesis here about the funky things that exist within this structure. Like the Off-topic forum (/forum/412) that is widely shared over many of SD’s sites versus the Off-Topic forum (note the capitalization difference, /forum/349) which is a subforum of the GalCiv II forum (/forum/162) that exists only on the GalCiv2 and Stardock (forums.stardock.com) sites.

And that really doesn’t begin to demonstrate the confusion.

I could also publish my entire list of SD forums except that it consists of 13 pages of a Word document and I doubt anyone really wants to read through all of that.

The point of this is that I believe that the entirety of SD’s forums needs a whole lot of tender loving care. Someone to go over all of the forums and make some sense of them all, organize them and prune many of the unnecessary and duplicates into a common, consistent, unified and most importantly understandable structure.

Not so much of a problem as just a very large source of confusion.

Actually the DG site being new is probably one of the more consistent sites out there.

Your point is that if the Demigod forum structure is essentially copied on another site then at least copy the *entire* Demigod forum along with *all* its forums and subforums. Why make the exception to copy everything but two selected subforums?

The same thing exists in many dozens if not hundreds of other forums across SD's forum sites. I don't have my list at the moment but if I recall correctly there are over 20 forums, subforums and sub-subforums associated with the GalCiv II forum (/forum/162) on the GalCiv2 site. Many but far from all of these are replicated on the forums.stardock.com site as well. The first point is do we really need over 20 seperate forums and subforums related to GalCiv2? And the second is if you're going to copy a branch of the forum tree on another site then you should copy it in it's entirety. 

There are many "orphan" forums that haven't had a new post in over 4 years. Then there are other forums like the Personal Computing forum (/forum/1) that on WinCustomize are major forums with 13 subforums and an additional 19 sub-subforums while on the GalCiv2 site the same Personal Computing forum (/forum/1) is merely a dead end subforum of the Off-topic forum (/forum/412, not to be confused with the aforementioned Off-Topic forum, /forum/349).

If you really want to get confused take a look at the forum tree branchs related to OS customization as they're implemented on WC and compare them to strikingly similar branches implemented on the JU, SD, XP themes and Vista themes sites.

I initially tried to make some sense of it all when I did my walkabout but it was impossible because there was no consistency. It's just a tangled web of forums that has enough correspondence from one site to the next to make you think you have an idea of what goes where but there are just so many exceptions to the rule that you really have no chance.

A valid argument. But even so if this is your argument then why would not only the GalCiv II forum be copied but also 4 of its 11 subforums along with the GalCiv Dev Journals for good measure. What's so special about those particular GalCiv II subforums? And then similarly why would the Stardock Games forum (http://forums.impulsedriven.com/forum/171) and the individual game forums underneath be so different on Impulsedriven than the identical Stardock Games forum that exists on the SD site (http://forums.stardock.com/forum/171)?

Of that there is no doubt.

I think you intuit way more forethought than actually exists. Saying that the forums were “meant” to be such and such implies both a plan and a methodology for executing that plan. In my opinion the separate forums started out separate and they simply evolved haphazardly ever since, gradually over time becoming more intertwined.

As you say these forums (except for the GalCiv1 forum which is a true orphan) share a similar codebase but it’s clear that they do more than that. They also share the *identical* database. The Off-topic forum is forum/412 at *all* sites on which it exists, no matter *where* in the hierarchical structure of that site it exists. Same thing with threads/articles *all* of which are accessible from *every* site even if the forum in which it’s contained is not otherwise accessible on a particular site.

For example you can go to *any* of Stardock’s forum sites and enter in the thread/article number and you can view and reply to posts that you could otherwise not see on that site. For example http://forums.galciv2.com/forum/349  is the Off-Topic forum that I’ve mentioned before. If you were to try and access this forum from WC i.e. http://forums.wincustomize.com/forum/349 you wouldn’t get the Off-Topic forum but would instead get a list of forums that are in some way “invisible” on WC (the whole invisible forum thing is a different discussion).

However taking a thread that’s contained in this Off-Topic forum as an example, http://forums.galciv2.com/348670, you can simply enter the article number from the WC site, http://forums.wincustomize.com/348670, (or any other SD site) and you can access and even respond to the thread even though it’s not otherwise visible on the site nor would that thread ever get listed in WC’s recent posts list.

To add even more confusion to this already confused situation you can consider the subtle differences in how “threads” are treated when created, accessed and replied to from a forum versus how an “article” is created, accessed and replied to from a “blog”. But blog articles and forum threads are totally identical and can be accessed and manipulated interchangeably by both forum and blog functions. Yet another major source of confusion.

I certainly understand that the scope of this issue may be way beyond your responsibilities, however there has been a steady progression within all of these sites to have a unified login, share a similar codebase and share the identical database and it does seem to me that the pruning of superfluous and duplicate forums and the general cleanup of old forums seems a natural progression of this process. Do you realize that there are close to 100 forums with less than 5 replies none of which are more recent than two years ago that exist across SD’s sites. You can’t be arguing that those forums are really necessary. I’m not saying to delete old threads because that’s deleting history but in virtually all cases the containing forum could easily be deleted and the threads simply moved up to the parent forum. That effort alone would go a long way towards making this collection of web sites more understandable.

Again I realize that this is something that is beyond the scope of a simple fix but it’s something for which I’ve been lobbying for quite some time and something that would make life far easier for those of us that wonder where the heck someone is coming from.

Yeah that's basically all I'm suggesting.

I certainly understand that the decision as to what forums go where is made at a very high level. I'm just suggesting that where it's at all possible things should be organized consistently.

Mostly I think the inconsistency is due to the fact that at the time it was decided that the GalCiv II forum also be accessible on forums.stardock.com they simply grabbed the GalCiv II forum and the subforums that existed at the time and made them accessible. But then later more subforums were added to the GalCiv2 site but not updated to the SD site. When Impulse came along they most likely simply copied what was on stardock.com in a similar manner. Like anything else I'm sure all this stuff started out consistent but as more copies were reflected to other sites newer changes in the originating site were not propagated to the copy sites. And then once you get to the point of 750+ forums the job just gets so huge that you feel it simply can't be logically accomplished.

But yeah, I feel a new broom and a bit of effort could go a long way to making things much more understandable. Within reason of course.