I'm fast approaching my third birthday here on BAUT. For a while now, I've had it in my head the changes I would implement if I were king for a day.
I do not say this lightly, but with more than 20 years experience in the area of electronic bulletin boarding.
The changes wouldn't be huge, and wouldn't take much time - I helped tommac build
this site over just a few hours, complete with nested levels of security and associated accesibility. I incorporated much of my thought as to how BAUT might be reorganized into his forum.
Put simply, they are as follows:
1. Keep the Universe Today and Bad Astronomy sections as they are. Their organization, as they exist now, is good, serves the purpose of those who created those sections, and should remain as they are.
2. Move General's Questions and Answers to the Space and Astronomy section. The Q&A thread is for questions within the genre covered by that section. The other threads in the Space and Astronomy section are more commentary, and are fairly well targeted.
3. Create a new section called Off-Topic Babbling and move the OTB forum there. It needs it's own home, as it's the largest forum - more than twice the size of any other forum except ATM. Then, rename it General, and create a couple of co-forums like Science and Industry, Our World (environment, history, weather...), etc.
4. Like OTB, create a separate section for ATM, and give it about three forums.
5. Since storytelling is fun, it should be a co-forum to Fun-n-Games. Let's call it Yarns.
The finished result would look something like this:
General
--About BAUT
--Fun-n-Games
--Yarns
Off-Topic Babbling
--General (all the old OTB threads)
--Science and Technology
--Only Human
--Not Human (everything else)
Against the Mainstream
--Astrophysics
--Evolution
--Science and Technology
--Conspiracy Theories
Universe Today (no change)
Bad Astronomy (no change)
Space and Astronomy
--Questions and Answers
--Astrophotography
--Space Exploration
--Astronomical Observing, Equipment and Accessories
--Life in Space
--Small Media at Large
General Science (it deserves it's own section)
Very little actual change is involved, as it's mostly reorganizing the folders into which things are stuffed.. These changes in vBulletin wouldn't take but a few hours to accomplish, most of which time the database is updating itself.
Something to consider...