Update Information on the Recent Forum Reorganisation

[Zwielicht]

This started off as a changelog post and then turned into a larger task over the course of the day.

If you haven't noticed by now, some subforums are now gone and converted into prefixes. The reason @Impulse and I did this was simply because these sections were quite inactive and we don't want OO to become a cluttered list of sections everyone forgets has trouble navigating. Like really, these sections had about 13-17 threads at the most in them. It's like dedicating a whole bedroom to just having a single bookshelf in it with 2 small books.

Because of how much we did today, this warranted its own thread and we've sent out an alert so that nobody is surprised by the changes. If you're interested, I'll go over the full list of changes that we've made below.

Renamed Category
The General was renamed to Productivity. Having a "General" subforum is admittedly a little lazy and reminded me of whenever I create "dumping" chests in games because I can't be bothered to organise something.

Sections Removed
We've removed 8 sections from the forum. I mentioned before that these sections barely had any threads in them, but some of them hadn't even received a new thread since October.

• Cryptocurrency has been moved under Support & Utility from Productivity. You know, it's not really a "productivity" type of category.
• The Automations section has been removed. This section was meant to be to discuss automations of your business, so instead of a whole section for it, there is now an Automations prefix under "Business"
• Journeys has been moved under the Productivity category. I considered removing this section since it's not used often, but the few threads we have in there are quite popular and it can be very encouraging for others to have journeys. I'd like to continue encouraging this, so the section will remain up.
• The Video & Graphic Design section has been removed. The existing prefixes and threads have been moved under the Tools At The Forge section. The reasoning for this is because the only threads we were really getting in that section were discussing tools for these types of media creation rather than the process itself.
• The Website Building section has been moved from the Internet Marketing category to the Productivity category. I was thinking back to my own experiences with internet marketing, and many of the websites I built were not for internet marketing purposes. Sometimes, I just built personal websites filled with things I liked with no plans to actually do any type of marketing for them.
• The E-mail Marketing section has been removed. Instead, we've added an e-mail marketing prefix to the General Marketing section.
• The E-Commerce section has been removed and a prefix for e-commerce has been created in the General Marketing section.
• The Content Writing & Copywriting section has been removed and replaced with a prefix for the General Marketing section. There are also now two separate prefixes for content writing and copywriting because these are not the same thing.

If need be, we can always turn these prefixes back into sections again should the topic become very popular on the forum and overtake the section the prefix is in. The idea is to not overwhelm new and current users with so many different sections when they want to select where to post.

 

[animesh]

Thanks for not removing the journey section.

I think as the forum grows, this section will be important because it matches what Office Outlaw is about. People sharing what they are actually working on and learning over time, not just posting theory or quick tips.