(This is mostly a reply to vixx's posts about why I think sub-forums would be good. :P)
Still being a fairly new player, I had no clue that groups had their own forums. But wouldn't it be nice to bring the whole community together more by giving them an improved common forum as well? Being able to share ideas within a group is good, but being able to share ideas between groups (and people without groups!) would be even better. :)
Although it may not be 'necessary', adding sub-forums to the current public forum would greatly improve readability. Maybe I'm just too used to visiting other forums- but I always like to browse forums by topic. For example, if I wanted to talk to other new players it would be nice to go to a sub-forum and find relevant posts easily there, rather than having to sort through posts about complicated stuff I haven't got my head around yet, or X, Y and Z etc… it is a little off-putting, so I quickly browsed away from the current forum without really looking at anything. I suppose what I'm trying to get at is- organisation makes things easier to navigate, which may make people more likely to utilise them.
I agree that chat is a great alternative to the forums, but I noticed that it can sometimes move very fast and it's difficult to follow if people are holding multiple conversations at once. But, for example, it would be very difficult to hold a long, thoughtful in-depth discussion in chat because of this, and also massive paragraphs would explode the text box. Kinda like this post, really. ;) Not to mention that a forum doesn't require the conversationalists to be online at the same time- might promote more communication between people in different timezones, too! In my opinion, chat and forums are two very different modes of communcation, so it would be awesome if the forums were given more love, too. ;)
I suppose another thing to consider is that the Foldit forum is the only forum the general public will know exists if they visit Foldit. It would be kinda cool for people to be able to get a feel for the community just by browsing through the forums and seeing how things work, before deciding whether or not to download the game.
Anyway, as you can probably tell I'm a forum junkie and love forums (much more than chat!), hence this post. ;) I know this suggestion is really just a quality of life improvement more than anything else, and that this game is still in beta, but it would be great to see some sub-forums eventually. :)
SUB-FORUMS #1
:P
