Ideal Dream Forum Structure

everything possible

[sunandoghosh]

IDEAL DREAM FORUM STRUCTURE

Hi friends

Can anyone present an example of structure of a forum which is capable of being expanded as per changing needs and which can embrace many forums / ategories /
subforums / and so on..................

i mean categorisation to any level yet easy to navigate from home page....

I mean how to have maximum in minimum....

I know i am talking something very abstract but then still i am sure someone can lay a conceret picture...

any example / blueprint...?

any idea where we can have ideal best forum structure which is all embracing....

thanks

sunando

[j4mes]

You're looking at it ;-)

[sunandoghosh]

well Webmasterworld content wise is best and reach from webmasters perspective...

but remember i am talking about structure not content....

i think u have not even reached where i want to start thinking...

it should be multi (multi) ((multi)) level concept ....

[rogerd]

In an ideal world, the best forum might have six or seven topics in a single layer. A visitor could arrive at the forum home and immediately grasp where to go next.

Unfortunately, reality and high posting volume often interfere. When a topic hits a high enough volume level, the single forum becomes unwieldy and a breakdown into subtopics makes sense; sometimes, the targeted nature of a subtopic makes sense even when the posting volume is low. That is, the subtopic is so self-contained that it practically demands its own forum.

I'm not sure there's an ideal structure. I have one forum that has about 400 subtopics at one level - it's not good from a navigation standpoint (I use an alphabetic layer above the 400 topics, which I hate...), but the nature of the subject demands this breakdown.

Perhaps one kind of ideal breakdown would give the new visitor no more than ten or 12 choices at each level (assuming that the topics neatly fit this way). The problem is that many topics aren't obvious. For example, here at WebmasterWorld, it's easy to break down "Google" into individual topics like "Adsense", "Adwords", etc. If a stranger arrived at the top level, he/she could intuitively figure out where to go to find Adsense optimization tips, even if only the "Google" topic was easy to see.

On the other hand, would a stranger looking for forum software recommendations intuitively know to click on "The Webmaster World"? Probably not; hence, it is necessary to display the next level of topics, resulting in a longer list.

[rogerd]

I'd add that one of the tensions in forum architecture is the struggle between fewer, larger topics (good for building the overall community and for ease of browsing new posts) and a larger number of specialized topics (good for building micro-communities and for focused, topical discussion).

There's no perfect answer - typically, the best solution evolves over time as a community grows.