Seeing sooz's reply in the request for a sports forum sparked another thought. I think we've all seen sites bloated with tons of boards/forums created on request of just a few people that are rarely used and just clutter up the site. Sooz's comment about not becoming too fragmented made me think of those.
So, my suggestion is two-fold: 1) to check if there is sufficient interest in any new forum to sustain it before adding it, and 2) to have some sort of policy/rule of thumb to eliminate inactive forums when it becomes apparent interest in them is lost.
On the first part, three possible ways to do that come to mind, but others might have better ideas too. The first would be simply to leave request posts up here long enough to get comments agreeing or disagreeing to the idea before acting on the request. This will likely work for the time being, while membership here is relatively small still. Another would be to create polls (I don't see it here now, but I thought yuku had a feature available to post polls) and see how many yays and nays there are on whether someone would use a particular forum if it were created. The last option would be to use a forum like the Miscellaneous "Cow Pies" to test interest in a topic, and if lots of people start discussing a particular topic in there with frequent new threads on it, then move those threads into a new forum and use those to start the forum.
On the second part, again, if a forum becomes inactive, or never gets as active as anticipated, the posts in it can always be moved out to a more general forum, like the Miscellaneous one, or maybe a single archive forum with more subfora for the inactive ones, and the main topic forum removed from the index page. I don't know how long a forum would have to go without posts, or how few new posts would be added to be considered inactive, but probably if there has been no activity in several months, it's not worth keeping.
I'm hoping this site lasts and grows, so these are thoughts that would apply to future adaptability. As membership interests change, this will allow new forums to be created while getting rid of old ones so we will always have a variety of places to discuss things without becoming overly bloated with defunct forums cluttering up the index page.
Just as a for example, in 3 years when the next round of election debate begins, we might want a board just for election discussion so it doesn't swamp out everything else. But, after the election is over, we might not want to see that board on the main page anymore. So, if it was created based on popularity, and then when it became obsolete moved into an archive forum, we wouldn't lose any of the posts, we would just keep the main index page current with the topics that are active.
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