Right now, I am thinking of breaking down the forum into digestible Chunks. What do I mean? currently, we have the gaming forums where retro is it's own entire board with everything slammed in there. This includes the Descriptions. Another example is the Nintendo section. It has the Switch, Switch 2 and many others crammed in there ... including the board descriptions.
I'm thinking of sub-boarding all the systems each in their own board in Nintendo (for example) to try to make things a bit cleaner for descriptions and in terms of URLs. I've established "pretty URLs" not that long ago to try to do better on the search engine ranks. This is also how we used to have things divided up, and I get the concern that many boards would look a bit under utilized due to activity.
Here's what the "pretty link" looks like for the Nintendo section:
https://www.chickendinnergaming.com/forum/nintendo-switch-2-switch-3ds-and-wii-u/
Instead, examples could be (removed https://www.chickendinnergaming.com/ from URLS as links are not real):
/forum/nintendo/
/forum/nintendo/switch-2
/forum/nintendo/swith
/forum/nintendo/3ds
In terms of retro... I don't know yet, I don't think we are ready to break everything out there either. Trying to come up with a plan.
I would like to get fresh thoughts on this. This is open to everyone... and I am tagging a several people here to try to ping them for opinions. I appreciate your help, time and participation. What I don't want to do is make the experience worse. This is to try to balance certain objects and try to gain more participation
What are your thoughts:
@mastermario @Grindspine @SpartanEvolved @Mai Valentine @CreepinDeth @retro junkie @targetrasp @trkorecky @Polygon @Jack @Snatcher_L
Bear with me, I am going somewhere with this,
I am mostly retro in my contribution to this forum. Occasionally I look at some oddball console which is usually retro focused. That is where the gaming industry has ran off and left me. I just can't handle the cost of admission or drum up any interest for each modern generation. That and my interests are mainly the old stuff. I am presently working on a few projects, game reviews. I want to focus on the homebrew and independent game publishers that are producing games for these old consoles.
With that being said. That would be the section I would haunt mostly. I do jump in here and there in other sections when I feel inclined to pitch in my 1 cent worth.
We have been rather busy on here recently, more so, than we have been in years. But it is great! Not sure what has prompted the interest. This place seems to get a lot of traffic. I have noticed some heavy traffic in some of my posts. Here lately I have seen interest in the Evercade posts. A question that comes to mind is how do we determine what is retro? Just a random thought.
We are a very small community. Forums don't seem to attract this modern young generation of gamers. And I am sure that any traffic we get are from people on their phones. I'm old school, in that I use my laptop.
SO...... what I am hearing from you is that you feel a need to reconfigure, reorganize, re-categorize, the small amount of posting from this community. I would suggest something simple based on what posts that we are making at the present. But at the same time you will need to cover all the basics, (consoles, etc.) Hmmmmm........
One problem that will be hard to work around is that even though we are a small community we seem to have broad interests, gaming is the common thread. Oh yeah right we are a gaming forum.(face palm) I guess what you are aiming at is you want the cream to be on the top with the other stuff down at.......hmmm, maybe the retro section organized by gaming generations? That would mean SNES, Genesis, TurboGrafic 16, Gameboy, game gear, etc, would be of the same generation? Not sure how that would work, or one section 8bit, then 16bit, 32bit consoles? But that would cause controversy when it comes to the Atari Jaguar.
Dividing it into smaller chunks might be good when looking for a particular console.
If we're going to have individual console forums, like in the Nintendo example, then we probably don't need a "Retro" forum. Having a Retro forum seems like it would also add work because if a console becomes retro then the site has to be adjusted to reflect that. Seems a little unnecessary.
Any one-off consoles can go in a miscellaneous section.
Let me add a little bit of a premise to this. So far, this conversation is for none-retro sections. However, This is how we (as a group) way back in 2018 (lol) determined "retro:"
Retro is currently defined as systems under 1080p... and / or systems that are emulating older systems. For example, the Genesis mini, or any other new system that MAY have been updated for resolution on current TVs, but still fit in older retro systems. Yes, this doesn't totally fit handhelds either... such as the 3DS. At the time we created the board, the 3DS was still current and the same thing with the Vita
There are 2 situations that could handle this... 1, we leave the current gen as current with stake in ground as of when we started the boards. 2, we can update this and move the topics from say Nintendo to Retro for 3DS. We can do this for systems that drop out of "current gen" and at an agreed upon time.
That point wasn't really up for consideration at this time to handle naming and a few other pieces of the more current boards. However, we can talk through that as well if we want to open it up.
1st potential solution is just update the Nintendo board to state Nintendo only. All systems to cover would be in the description, and we just continue on as is. This would solving potential naming issues cleaning up for search engine optimization of titles. Then repeat for the other titles.
2nd solution would be to break down the Nintendo section (for example) to sub boards:
Switch and Switch 2 (or switch and switch 2 separately, IMO that's harder because they're so similar), Wii U, and 3DS. Sony could be renamed to Sony and sub boards of Playstation 3, 4, 5, and Vita. However, we are in the same conundrum of 3/4/5 being so close.
I'm leaning on the rename right now to clean up links a bit for the pretty links. However, I'm also thinking things through for the future of the forums. I've been working on the next step and getting us out there more with better SEO...etc... and trying to get more traffic flowing. You've most likely experienced that more since last December. I made a ton more updates and changes since July... and we have been seeing some results... but those changes need to bake in and adjustments made.
The overall idea is to get more people here and staying.