IPS site & forum organization

[Ocean West]

I have been perusing thru the forums here and feel that the site organization is a bit frustrating.

There are several boards for the same product but in a different category:

IPS Company Feedback -> IP.Board
Peer-To-Peer Technical Support -> IP.Board
Product Modifications -> IP.Board
Tracker -> IP.Board

Although I appreciate that it is grouped by General area topic then by specific product when researching or reviewing the product it would be most helpful to
have all forums for that product in one section.

It would be great if there were a way to create an Alias of forums and categories so that you could group existing content and not have to
have disparate conversations that span different categories.

Example

Product Forums ( A category )
-- IP.Board ( A Category )
---Feedback
---Peer-To-Peer Technical Support
---Product Modifications
---Tracker

The above "alias" forums would appear in the forums lists.
they would serve to organize existing forums.

Just a few ideas ;)

S

[rct2·com]

Was thinking exactly the same thing myself. Too many forums with the same name. +1 (the max I can award)

Rather than rename them, another way would be to show the hierarchy in the search results. So (for example) when I view new content and it tells me it is in the "IP.Board" forum, it could tell me that it is in Peer-to_peer Support > IP.Board or Product Modifications > IP.Board. One level above the containing forum ought to be enough.

[.Ian]

could see the advantage of sorting them via product.

That way anyone who does not have a particular product can ignore an entire section.

[bfarber]

I kind of like the idea of aliases.

I think a more generic, but more usable approach, would be to allow "favorite forums". A user would create a category in their user cp, then add forums that they want to that category. So you would do this manually, if you wanted (or the next person could just add their 3 favorite forums into a category and only have that on the homepage).

There's a lot of consideration that would have to go into a feature like this though. Admin-defined forums that can't be hidden comes to mind.