New forum structure?

[Tom]

Hi Touti,

are you open for discussing the possibility to reorganize this forum?
In my opinion they are too many hardly used subforums. Also in some cases it is hard to decide, in which forum a specific new thread should be posted.
Opinions?

[madacid]

as a newbie in this forum, I second that

[Tom]

And now I have done it and posted it in the wrong subforum 
Feel free to move it to "Suggestions & Requests".

[Touti]

I was actually "contemplating" this possibility just a few days ago.  I too felt it became difficult sometimes to know where to put things.

Let's start a discussion and see what comes up !

[Tom]

First of all, I think we can savely combine all subforums of "Home Theater & HTPC" into one single subforum.
And I think we can get rid of "DVD Authoring" (only one topic with no replys).

Also "Studios" in "Video" section has no topics. Also "Distributors" in the "DVD Talks" section.

[Tom]

"Video->Movie analysis" can be removed and existing topics moved to "Movie Reviews"

[Tom]

"Video->Movies" can be combined into "Movie Reviews".
"Video->TV Series" can be combined into "TV on DVD Reviews" (maybe rename it to "TV Series Reviews"

[Tom]

I think we should move the "Reviews" section further up as it as developed to our focal point of this forum.

Moving the existing topics in "Foreign Recommendations" to the "Movie Reviews", and we can get rid of the "Video" section altogether (if realizing my previous suggestions).

[Tom]

Rename "DVD Reviews" to "Reviews".

Now we would only need to compact the "DVD Talk" section. Maybe combine "Good Deals" and "Online Stores".
Remove "HD-DVD" and combine with "BluRay".

[madacid]

...Remove "HD-DVD" and combine with "BluRay".

better call it "HiDef Media" 

[DJ Doena]

All suggestions sound very reasonable to me.

*and offline again*

[Touti]

"Distributors" and "Studios" are gone, they were meant to discuss news about distributors and studios but obviously they were useless.

The "DVD Authoring" category is gone altogether, if one day we have members on the forum who want/need such a section we can always recreate it.

BluRay and HDDVD are now combined into HiDef Medias.

Now before we go any further I'd like to bring up a point which may affect the way we're gonna reorganize the forum. There was a reason for creating the "DVD Reviews" and the "Video" section.

The "DVD Reviews" section is there for people who want to post their own reviews of a dvd/movie they've watched.  The "Video" (which is probably not the right name) section on the other hand is there for discussions about any movie and/or tv series.  Movies in theatres, movies on TV, movies that are in production or soon to be out in theatres etc.  Although I agree on reducing the number of sections, I'm not sure it a good idea to put all movie discussions and reviews in the same pot.

The "Movie Analysis" section:  A while ago I suggested that we do something similar to people who organize book reading clubs, they pick a book, read it and then meet to discuss it.  I thought it would be nice to do the same with movies and I created the sections for that because forum members suggested that it should be in separate sections.

[Touti]

All the posts in the "Home Theatre" section and its forums have been combined into a single forum called "Hardware" which is in the "General" category.  The "Home Theatre" section is gone.  Although it's important to have a place to discuss hardware, it is become more and more obvious that DVD Collectors Online is a place where we talk about DVD's and Movies and that the hardware doesn't have a big place in our discussions.

[Touti]

The "Announcements" and "Suggestions & Requests" sections are important but they are not used much so I created a new section for them and put it at the bottom to get them "out of the way".

[DJ Doena]

If I may be so bold to make another suggestion:

I'd change the positions of "DVD Talk" and "DVD Reviews" categories? Why? Because in "Marathon Reviews" are most of the new posts - aside from the text and image games.

On a usual 768 / 864 / 960 screen the "DVD Review" is out of sight when the forum is loaded. But new posts are always a good sign of activity in the forum and it's always good to see at once that there is something new to read on the forums.