Perhaps it's not my place to criticize as I'm not really much of an active member on here, but I'd probably be much more inclined to use the forums if they weren't divided into a million overly specific categories. Lots of the forums here have only just a few threads at the top that have even been posted in in the last month. This is annoying especially when looking at the rides forum and seeing a bunch of events on the front page that happened months ago. Seriously whats the deal? Is there really enough demand for a whole forum about powdercoating and painting? You only have to go down four threads to get to one that hasn't been posted in since August.

Have you tried using "View new posts" at the bottom of the forums pages?

Ah, that is quite helpful. Never noticed that existed.

Personally, I'm into the categories. I'm a note taker and a list maker, so it's easier to find what I'm looking for when it is divided up and organized, rather than scrolling through hundreds of irrelevant threads to get to the info I'm looking for. I actually have a suggestion for a new one..

it can be a half dozen of one situation either way.

I've been on forums with only a few categories and find things roll down and off so fast its hard to keep up.

We could conceivably have a category with only helmet threads.

The forum hierarchy is fairly similar to the original structure, but over the years, a few new fora have been defined and some have gone away or been merged. When Bicycle Theory bought the site and rolled out the redesign, the categories were culled slightly, but in essence we wanted users to be able to watch just the fora that were relevant to their interests, and provide some structure and organization to the content on the site. Further merging of forums would mean making a lot of decisions about where individual threads would go, and honestly, that is a time-consuming process fraught with danger (people often have strong opinions about where things belong).

When we move to the new platform, we will be organizing things a little bit differently, and there will be top-level indexes that will show topics from multiple forums, which should provide the best of both worlds. One will be able to look at all of the topics under "Rides" for example, or go further down and just see "Road Rides."

We know that some fora are fairly inactive, and those are candidates for being merged, but in some cases, they don't really belong anywhere else, so we just maintain it.

If there is a concrete request to merge or split fora, we are willing to entertain it.

We could conceivably (and maybe should) have a forum of just HerculesTRockefeller threads

I lol'd

can we merge them into a HelmetGun thread?

What we need is:

• General Bike Chatter
• Mechanical Questions
• Crime alerts
• Buy/sell/trade
• Offtopic
• Helmet threads
• Cars are assholes
• WTF is wrong with this cyclist?
• Animated gif threads

:p

That's actually a very good starting list, it's missing "rides" though.
I feel like maybe "helmet threads" could be opened up to many different types of biking-related, yet irrelevant discussions. Maybe "helmet/moped/ticket* threads." Perhaps we could include a back-patting, "there there" spin-off of TOTH/WOTF that would include all "WOTF to the asshat who..." posts, and all their sympathetic, blindly-motivated replies.



*This excludes bat56's actually informative thread on his ticket battles.

every thread is animated gif thread. duh