Staffing When do you create a new area?

[Morrigan 1,826]

So, As I stare at forums here on DF I am considering adding a forum to split Roleplay and from Coding/Grpaphics as the coding/Graphics get a little drowned out by Roleplay conversations.

 

Obviously a little different than what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about you have a "general" area and a few threads pop up at some specific place (lets call the it a Restaurant named Food) when is that you take and make the "Food" area it's own thing and separate it out of the "general" area.

 

For me it's 10 posts per location (which means the forum would need 10 that would stay and 10 that would go) each before Food would be created. How about for you? Do you choose not to make those areas?

 

I will admit that I like when IC actions tend to create the areas via use. This includes like "Character owned" shops and stuff.

[CovertSphinx 710]

Depends on the day for me. On an Anime Crossover site I used to staff, we would add new locations mainly based on request from members and usefulness to overarching Site-Wide Plots.

[Elena 546]

I wouldn;t add the shops and places inside a town as subboards. The town itself is a subboard, and inside it there is only a subboard for completed threads, so that the ongoing ones to be the only ones attracting attention.

 

The timestamp of the first post of each thread mentions the place and time; it is all that it is needed for orientation in time and space.Yes, the town board has a few pinned information threads, including the description of the island and the town and the description of the main existing shops and inns, so that every writer would see the same thing.

 

When would I add a new area (town or ship)? When the story justifies it. If we sink a main ship (not one of the NPC adversaries), that subboard is set to read only, and its replacement ship is made. For areas... not sure. We condensed, rather than opening new ones, given that there is also an "Everywhere else".

[Huskerdust 625]

For PTU, we already have all our forums created. We're just waiting to roll them out via expansions as we play more. We really just have the towns and dungeons and no sub-boards at the moment. I'm sure if certain places became popular, we'd plop it in there as a sub-forum for itself but as of now, that's waaay not needed. We have less than ten threads per board.

[VirusZero 176]

In general I only create a new section when something has at least 30 topics worth of content. (Or can reasonably be expected to get that much.)  This way it kind of proves that there is a call for that forum/section to exist. Otherwise I try to fold everything down as much as possible to keep things compact, easier to manage and hopefully less intimidating for guests.

[Cloud 0]

I create areas based on the point in the story the site has reached or if players have developed a new area via in player actions (or destroyed one). 

Just recently, Space Exploration became a thing on my board. So an "Open Space" and "Other Planet" forum were added for people to play on. I'm not too worried about some areas getting more attention than others. I'm a fan of the variety of locations without having a TON of areas that are basically the same. 

 

 

[Rune 1,099]

We have a few methods of doing this.

 

Once a year, we go through and add/remove forums based on the attention they get/what people suggest. (We do a big survey where people can suggest a forum to be removed/suggest new ones all anonymously.) And then we have a method for members to get subforums made for businesses/whatever but they have to have 3 1+ page topics taking place there.

[Honorem 219]

As CovertSphinx said, if there's a request for it and it's a swell idea, bam added.

 

But another reason (and this is regarding new forums in general, not necessarily roleplay areas so apologies if it goes a bit off topic): if I realize the site just needs something else which is widely used elsewhere and for good reason - it's helpful! Example being my plotter/wanted ads section was just a single board. I realized it was pretty cluttered having plotters, wanted ads, character journals and trackers to all be in that one place, so I added sub-sections for each to tidy it up.