Quote Originally Posted by passel View Post
I never look through any of the forums.
I click on the "Settings" menu to see if any threads I've posted in (thus subscribed to) are listed and read those first.
Then I click on "New Posts", which will show what has changed in all the forums since I last logged on and that I haven't looked at already.
This only works once you're registered. I was thinking of new/unregistered ones.

(Also, those are *really* unintuitive places to look. Who thinks of going to "settings" to list a list of updated posts, and that tiny little "New Posts" link is barely noticeable!)

Quote Originally Posted by passel View Post
I'm wondering why you thing that is a bad thing? Why you would want the forum rigged so that you would be tricked into looking at post more than a year old because it was lumped together with other old threads in one combined forum.
We have enough people responding to really old posts as it is without trying to encourage it.
Sorry, all my comments should be prefaced with "if I'm a new user..."

If I'm a new user, here to ask a question about something like IoT, and the forum I want to use has < 100 threads and hasn't seen a new post in months, what are the odds of me getting an answer to my question? I'm more likely to head to StackOverflow.

But if there's a "General Programming" area that's bustling with activity, I'm much more likely to post my question there. Dedicated subforums with low traffic don't encourage this, IMO; busy general-purpose forums with high traffic do.

wossname's original suggestion was borne out of an observation that forum traffic is way down, so I think we're all brainstorming ways to make vbforums more appealing to new users. IMO, a front-page that shows a ton of dead forums with no recent posts is not a good way to lure new users in.

Quote Originally Posted by wossname
And throw away a HUGE volume of high quality programming advice gained FOR FREE over 15+ years? What colour is the sky on your planet?
No one's talking about losing existing information... right? Just condensing it?

For example, if we merged jQuery into a generic "web programming" forum, all the current jQuery posts would be moved there, not deleted, I assume...?