I've tweaked my suggestion somewhat and will edit my first post as well with my updated suggestion. The biggest tweak is an additional music forum specifically to discuss releases, like upcoming album releases or album reviews. I've also divided the general discussion forums into two separate secions (music and off-topic).

My amended suggestion is as follows:

Musicbanter forums

• Music section
  • Artists corner - For discussions on music production, equipment, songwriting, etc.
  • General music - For general discussions related to musical arts and artists
  • Releases forum - For threads relating to specific releases like album reviews, etc.

• Off-topic section
  • Media corner - Discussions on non-music media like books, movies & video games
  • Philosophy - For discussions on religion, morals, science, the nature of reality, etc.
  • The Lounge - For general discussions that would be off-topic in the above forums

• Community section
  • Introductions - New members can introduce themselves here
  • Member journals - Members can create their journals here

• Admins section
  • Announcements & feedback - Mods and admins announcements and members feedback
  • Archive - Threads that have been locked down

It does for people who aren't logged in.

Haha :laughing: Alright, I can go with that.

Or sitting on a log.
Or at loggerheads.
Or dropping a... I'll just leave it there, shall I?

Get rid of all the music sections

Personally I like having a lot of sections divided by specific categories because if it was all dumped into one section it would be a lot harder to find specifically what I'm looking for, if I'm looking for a thread related to a specific genre that has a specific section I know where to find it and yeah it probably won't be that active but at least the threads I like and participate in won't quickly be buried by a much of newly created threads I don't care about.

I'd rather have a bunch of dead sub-forums than a few that are so busy that potentially good threads get buried before they even have a chance.

I think a problem with dead subforums is they kinda tell you you're probably not gonna get much response to whatever it is you write in there, so it's an incentive killer. It indicates the lack of interest and placement in a forgotten place won't help your thread get noticed. Also, as someone who listens to a variety of music, I don't mind discussing artists from different genres in the same forum. If it's too active so that things get buried, sure that can be a problem, but it's one you can then deal with when (and if) it becomes relevant.

Also it is possible to curate threads or, if we could update MB and expand on its functionality, perhaps use tags or other ways to sort things besides keeping these genre oubliettes gathering dust.

It was nice back in the day when it felt like MB was in a little way made up of smaller communities, like we had our prog lovers gang and kinda ran the prog subforum for a while. But that's a lot of members ago and MB isn't like that anymore.

I dunno I think if you post in a dead thread that will usually bump it if a forum is active enough because we can all see which threads have new posts and that usually gets our attention.

I think this forum should have SOME form of genre categorization, if we can find a way to do that while downsizing the number of subforums then I'm fine with that.

Gotta admit I'd like to keep the prog and psychedelic rock subforum because I was one of the people that aggressively campaigned for it, but if we really have to merging it with the classic rock subforum wouldn't be the end of the world I guess. :(