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Originally Posted by ogduncan
What i think he is trying to say is that it is spreading the posts too thin. We dont even have posts in one topic yet. I heard something about 200 members now. We dont need a forum for every 11 members. I personaly go to forums to find out about events, mods, whats for sale and to help others in knowledge about their vette.
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The reason for multiple forums is an attempt to segregate threads of like topics roughly together to keep some sort of cohesion within the forum. It would be a real nightmare to have only a single forum where ALL topics could be posted, and you would have to scan through every thread in order to find one you may be interested in. So the idea is to break up all the threads that any member may want to post into logical categories. So someone only interested in posting and reading about events, for instance, could simply go to that specific forum, and not have to wade through dozens or more of threads completely irrelevant to their interest.
This would especially be true, for example, if you remembered a post made three weeks ago and wanted to find it again. Well, quite likely, if you know what the topic was about, you could narrow down your search considerably simply by checking the forum that would most likely contain it. This isn't always true, of course, but probably is most of the time.
And as is usually true from what I have seen, the more traffic a site gets, the more forums it has to create to further subdivide the posts to make all that above true even with high traffic volumes. To give you a perfect example, if any of you were around when Ebay first started up, you will perhaps recall how few topic areas there were available. When more and more auctions were being posted, it got tedious to have to wade through a bunch of them to try to find exactly what you were looking for. So as the volume increased, further subcategorization was done in order to make it easier for people to find something specific. But this in itself can have drawbacks to which there is probably no good answer. It is entirely possible to have far too many sections, where even finding the SECTION you are looking for is an exercise in tedium. Which is now the case with Ebay.
But in all cases, you can only try to do the best you can. Sometimes you hit the mark and sometimes you don't.