Mountaineers Forums

Is there a chance we can create a new sub-topic within the Climbing Forum entitled something like, 'Basic Climbing Course 2008 - SIG Feedback'?  I think it would be helpful for anyone involved in the new 'SIG experiment' if we had a place to post comments and feedback regarding this new rollout. I think it is vast enough to deserve it's own forum.

I'm sure this next season will prove interesting.....

There is a tendency to want to create a dedicated forum for each specialized discussion sub-topic but this proliferation of forums is generally not a good idea.  You end up with lots of low-traffic forums and the message board becomes less appealing to those browsing the site because messages are scattered across too many forums.  Many discussion threads aren't easily categorized by a single narrow forum.

The discussion threads themselves serve as a good way of segregating postings about a particular topic.  If you look at postings from the past year you will see that while there have been a fair number of postings specific to the basic climbing course these have been contained within only a handful of distinct discussion threads.  The real test of whether or not a dedicated forum is in order is if you have a high volume of traffic with enough new threads related to a given topic that it becomes tedious to wade through new threads to find threads of interest.  With the low volume of traffic on the Mountaineers Forums there are no specific sub-topics that warrant a dedicated forum.

A special case can be made for creating a dedicated forum that by design is not meant to be of interest to the broader message board membership.  An example was the Sport Climbing Seminar sub-forum which was created for those taking the seminar and then was decommissioned once the seminar ended. In the case of a specialized sub-forum for the basic course, our best bet is to defer to the basic climbing subcommittee.

-The Mountaineers Forums Admin Team