Forum restructure

I didn't forget — that was phpBB being its classic flaky self. I had to recalculate the forum information after shuffling stuff around, and in the process phpBB helpfully added all the posts in EoT to users' post counts. It seems the 'don't increment post count' setting only kicks in at the point of being posted.

I'll look into if there's a way this can be undone, but this is a bit of terrible coding I might not be able to work around automatically.

Quote from skdr

I think special subforums (spotlight etc.) should be above the creative gallery forums.

I agree, and that is to be the case once the spotlight stuff is all implemented.

I also see your point Zacker about the title of the release forum's length. For now I've shortened it because the spotlight stuff isn't in place yet (I'm hoping to get that done within the next week or so).

I'm sorry you feel that way Sentura, but all evidence I've seen thus far (including MapCore's very detailed statistics) shows that the vast majority of people visited most of the development forums very rarely, if at all; instead, people gravitated towards the three WIP forums and the rest were almost completely ignored (we're talking 0.5–2% of MapCore's overall visits in a given month).

If activity ever does rise to the point where sub-topics can be justified then that's certainly something I'll look into.

The overwhelming majority of posts in the engine discussion forum could have gone into 3D, which is indeed where you would post if it does fall under that label. In fact, less than a handful of posts in there really needed to be divided into a separate forum, with most concerning level design.

Threads like "best game engine" and "licensing X's engine" could easily just go in Gaming Discussion — and it's not like slightly more technical threads haven't appeared in there before. Plus by posting in a more active forum you're more likely to get many rather than a few replies.

As I said though, I will be monitoring threads and if I do notice a lot of threads are appearing which might be better suited to an individual forum then I'll do that. This is far from the first time I've worked on the way a forum is structured, and I'm pretty good at doing it in way that encourages rather than discourages new threads. The main goal here was to trim things right back so I can mould the forum structure around posting habits rather than having nine semi-dead forums that were confusingly named.

It's not possible to have per-user forum layouts in phpBB. The closest you could theoretically get is for everyone to tag their threads with [map], [model], etc and then use the search tool to filter them, but there's no inherent way to make that mandatory.

At this time I don't think such measures are necessary because even with all the merging, the 3D forum is still only on about 30 new threads per month, and the 2D forum is on about 10 per month — perhaps that brings home just how inactive many of those forums were. It's not a big deal to work out with a quick glance if it's a thread that interests you.

Again, if it does get to the point where it becomes tricky to dig through the thread list then I will introduce sub-forums to aid that.

That's more what the work release forum is for. The threads in the 2D/3D forum are inherently more technical because they typically consist solely of WIP work; while I do believe going even further and merging 2D and 3D could be interesting, I think that'd be a step too far for some people.