Dedicated forums are best reserved for topic areas with regular activity. A common mistake board owners make is creating too many forums in the misguided attempt to organize
topics instead of active
discussions. It typically results in "dead" sections of the board.
As a few rules of thumb, I advise creating a forum when there is a minimum of three pages of non-trivial existing threads in other forums, its topic area aligns well with the site's overall mission ("your guide to exceptional espresso"), there is a developing audience to the specific topic area, and finally a Team HB member (or potential member) has specific interest in leading the discussion of the nascent discussion.
The latest forums created under these guidelines are
Home Roasting and
Coffees. The latter has caught on and is clearly going to stay. The Home Roasting forum's future is less certain (e.g., one page spans +8 weeks of discussion, which suggests it is hasn't reached a critical mass of adherents).
timo888 wrote:It would be convenient to have all repair, spare parts, and restoration threads for vintage machines collected in a new forum to make it easier to find them; this would allow users to take better advantage of the existing Search-by-Forum option.
That's a problem all forums struggle with: How to unearth the jewels buried among more mundane discussions? I suggest starting with indexing strategies (e.g.,
FAQs and Favorites, social bookmarks like del.icio.us, dedicated search). This will become easier with the next version of phpBB since it natively supports bookmarking. I don't think it supports tagging, but I would like to add it to improve seach results. For example, in your case, all noteworthy threads related to restoration would be tagged as such, and search results could be limited to threads tagged with it.
