Feedback Requested: Forum Cleanup

Here we go!

- The Announcements Board for all important site manager announcements

- The Bug Board for reporting issues

- A general "On Topic" board for all discussion, articles, etc., related to the site's setting or theme. I think most of the first three forums, save Civic Festhall, could be merged into this. Definitely the first two boards

- An "on topic" "creative endeavors" board for fiction, art, etc. This board is strictly for literary, artistic, and similar pursuits. If you're posting about a site, a cutter, a faction, etc., you go to the general Planescape board. If you're writing a piece of fiction or drawing a picture, it goes in this creativity board- A "general gaming" board for all non-Planescape gaming. General 3.x/4e, Pathfinder, White Wolf, whatever other gaming topics would go here.

- An "off topic" forum for discussion about almost anything. A lot of sites I've seen limit what you can actually talk about here (i.e., no politics or religion) and I think this is a good idea - especially in a place like this where we have some pretty peaceful philosophical discussions beyond the scope of our world. My opinion is that we don't need real-world politics here and if people want to discuss them, they can go to a political site

- The requisite gaming boards for PbP gaming. As a side note, I think the Sensorium board could probably fit in the "on topic fiction" board.

- Some sites (like FoS) have a forum dedicated to site projects and community projects. A site project would be the 4e Planescape Setting, while a community project would be if someone decided to create, say, "Arborea: The Campaign Setting" or "Professor Thomas Carter's Notes on the Lower Planes" or "Angels, Aasimon, and Aasimar, a Book on Celestials" or whatnot. I think these kinds of boards would be useful to Planewalker.

I would clear out and archive pretty much any section board that hasn't seen consistent activity for a certain amount of time. Some of these boards haven't gotten a post in over a year. Keep them accessible, of course. I just think we shouldn't have them on the front forum page anymore. I think it makes the forums look empty.

Also, if at all possible to include on the forum index, a brief description of the forum would be useful. I don't work in drupal so I donno if you can put the description on like phpBB and SMF do. If you can't, I think each forum should have a sticky post explaining what it's for and what posts go there.

Give or take a few boards from my above list as the site seems to warrant. I'd definitely keep announcements at the top so they're not missed. With what's left, I think it will help tremendously to be explicit and clear about what goes in each forum.

Ok, here is my critique of the forum post page, just a quick one. Sorry if it is a little terse.

The forum post page is somewhat cluttered and confusing, but it can be fixed.

First move the "Vocabulary" down below the Body section and make it closed by default like Roll Dice, Flags and File attatchments and try to think of a better name for "Vocabularies" as I think it is a bit vague for an end user.

Also if you can change the display of the three menus to drop-down style menus to reduce the space they take up. As it is they put in a lot of white space and take up a lot of the field so that the writer has to scroll down to even see the body part which is what they really care about when they are posting.

Change "Forums" to "Forum" unless you are going to allow posting to multiple forums at once.

About, may be shown directly under the body by default, seperated from the Vocabularies section.

The section below Body starting with "Allowed HTML tags:" and ending with "More information about formatting options" should be put into a new "Help" section similar to the Roll Dice help section. The vocabularies section should also get its own help sub-section.