[tonton]

It is clearly a better idea to file threads according to where the thread will receive the most interest, and not according to some fictitious need to "decrease load".

For instance, the "Overclocking Titanium" thread is bot a Mac Modification thread and a Powerbook thread. It could easily be filed in either area, or both.

But in the Mac Modification forum, it will receive interest from about 25% of all readers in that forum, keeping in mind that that forum receives very little readership to begin with.

While in the PowerBook forum, it will interest 75% of the readers from a much larger pool.

Not only is the total readership greater in the PB forum, but the percentage of readers who might be interested is greater as well. Moving that thread to Mac Modification was as good as killing it.

As far as "reducing load" goes, there were 19 threads on the PowerBook board which received comments through the entire day on April 12. I don't think there's any real need to "decrease load".

MacNN has 30 forums! Don't you think that in itself creates more work for you all? Don't you see any value in simplicity, streamlining? Apple Insider has much busier individual boards, especially Future Hardware and Apple Outsider. The moderators on AI don't have any problem moderating those busy boards, even when being attacked by a "MaDToOL" or a "Junkyard Dawg". MacNN is bureaucracy at it's most inefficiently bureaucratic. You'd make the US government proud.

God, please bring back Apple Insider and our lovely simple threads, so we can be a family again.

[tooki]

1. I suppose a better choice of words might have been "load balancing" -- ensuring that the topic-specific forums also get traffic. By letting everything stay in the main forums, they don't get traffic. The less popular forums stand to gain by having things moved into them -- we'd like to have lots of people looking at all the forums. Also (see below), almost all of the moderators are volunteers. I don't get paid to do this, so I can't devote 8 hours a day of my time to it. That's also why 19 threads is actually quite a bit for two people (who have full time jobs or school) to go through multiple times a day (and yes, you need to go through more than daily if you want to be thorough about catching flame wars when they're still just flame pissing contests).

2. The Overclocking Ti thread could indeed go in either, BUT: it involves modification to the hardware of the machine. To be honest, I don't want most of the people seeing it, because MOST people do not have the necessary soldering skills to safely perform the procedure. The Mac Modification forum is, in my opinion, a better place, because I expect that most people there are more knowledgeable and thus less likely to come to us saying "I followed the instructions in the powerbook forum and now my laptop is dead!"

3. I do think the forums could be more streamlined. Unfortunately, I am not capable of making such changes.

4. This is not an "inefficient bureaucracy." This is, aside from Misha and a handful of other MacNN employees, all done by volunteers. I don't get paid for my services here. I also don't really get told how I need to do things. I moderate the way I would like for forums to be moderated which I like to visit. If you don't like that, I'm very sorry, but I am not going to change just for you.

tooki