I like the new forum structure of the new Wiki site, but I'm concerned that "Design Theory" is going to become the all purpose garbage forum that Game Design currently is. Is that something we want to try to prevent? If so, one way to do it might be to further subdivide that forum into two or three forums.
I'm not sure how that should be done, but I suggest adding "new game ideas" and "mechanics".
"New game ideas" would be for the kinds of posts that read like this: "Hey, I just had an idea to make a game about spatulas. What do you think? Anyone want to help me brainstorm?" Quarantining these posts in a separate forum might minimize their uselessness, and indeed, might create a useful location for people to go "shopping" for interesting theme ideas.
"Mechanics" would be specifically for the discussion of how to create, balance, and implement mechanics. This would be a good home for all the "check out my new combat system" mechanics (of which I've posted a few!), and for isolating discussion of mechanics from...all the other stuff that gets posted in Game Design.
Another suggestion is to encourage folks to use the GDW again. seems that at present, we get quite a few posts where people post their ruleset in the Game Design forum and hope to get some feedback. Such posts rarely do seem to get more than a few replies, which validates the GDW concept -- the "I read your rules, you read mine" really works as a motivator for getting feedback. It would be nice to funnel the "rulebook" posts out of the Game Design forum and back into the GDW, because it was useful when people were still using it. (Not that I mind the reduced workload!)
Just some suggestions, to take or leave!
-Jeff
I don't object at all to the idea of a clean slate, and I agree that copying the existing forums over to the new site would be laborious and wouldn't be worth the effort.
However, I don't agree that all of the useful content can necessarily be "saved" simply by members sifting it and creating new wiki pages out of it.
For example, some of the most useful content in the forum discussions is the specific solution of specific design problems. Eg "I need help with balancing this market mechanic." "Try this out -- you could do X, Y, and Z". That kind of discussion is nice to be able to refer back to in the archives when similar questions or similar design problems arise. ("I remember a conversation I had with Zzzz about a market mechanic a year ago -- let me search the forums and see"). The problem is that these conversations are often so specific that they don't necessarily generalize well, and thus probably wouldn't be appropriate as wiki pages. And even if they were, the content won't be going in intact and in context, and so doing a search for "jwarrend Zzzz market mechanic" might not yield anything, so the information might be effectively lost even if it is technically preserved.
One idea that is somewhat unrelated but might be neat would be to create a "best of" forum; to ask people to nominate their favorite discussions/topics from the old site and either write a capsule summary of the discussion or else just import the discussion whole. But that will probably create too much work for someone.
Anyway, just wanted to say that I think the removal of the forums would be a real loss. It appears that it will be possible to keep the old site up for a few months. What is the obstacle to keeping it up permanently? Is it disk space, or cost, or something else?
-Jeff