I resemble your suggestion 100%, as I suggested something similar over on POTN recently, and some people got really angsty and bitter about it, like little children. POTN is one of the friendliest forums around, so it caught me a little off guard. Can't imagine suggesting something like this on FM, the melt downs and whinging there would be hilarious Great site for info and B&S, but the user base is terrible.
Over on POTN, there are sub-forums for each brand, but they appear dead or slow because there's so few Nikon/Sony/Fuji shooters (POTN used to be a Canon-only forum), so I suggested just consolidating down to a single "Sony Gear", "Nikon Gear", etc instead of "Sony Cameras, Sony Lenses, Sony Accessories" forum for each brand, to both centralize and boost activity, more like FM is laid out. I just think the problem is, like stated above, if there wasn't enough member activity, the site would appear stagnant. I feel you though, I shoot Canon occasionally, and there's little Canon activity to be seen here; I've never seen a Fuji post here on BCG either, but I don't care because I don't use it for wildlife
As to a solution here, maybe there's a way to set up tagging when a thread is created, and then allowing for sorting by tags? That way you keep the activity level high in the forum so as to attract users who won't fly away as soon as they see no recent posts (in a dedicated sub-forum), but also allow hiding stuff you don't necessarily wish to see. That way there isn't a need to create a sub-forum for each brand that may never see real activity.
Over on POTN, there are sub-forums for each brand, but they appear dead or slow because there's so few Nikon/Sony/Fuji shooters (POTN used to be a Canon-only forum), so I suggested just consolidating down to a single "Sony Gear", "Nikon Gear", etc instead of "Sony Cameras, Sony Lenses, Sony Accessories" forum for each brand, to both centralize and boost activity, more like FM is laid out. I just think the problem is, like stated above, if there wasn't enough member activity, the site would appear stagnant. I feel you though, I shoot Canon occasionally, and there's little Canon activity to be seen here; I've never seen a Fuji post here on BCG either, but I don't care because I don't use it for wildlife
As to a solution here, maybe there's a way to set up tagging when a thread is created, and then allowing for sorting by tags? That way you keep the activity level high in the forum so as to attract users who won't fly away as soon as they see no recent posts (in a dedicated sub-forum), but also allow hiding stuff you don't necessarily wish to see. That way there isn't a need to create a sub-forum for each brand that may never see real activity.