My suggestion for improving the forums is essentially to simplify them.

Remove many forums that are infrequently visitied and merge them into other forums.

A sure fire way to KILL a board and make it dead is to have too many forums gathering dust and cobwebs with tumbleweed blowing around in them. You can see it already happening here - many of the subforums are just dead, and the huge number of forums, combined with their poor activity levels deter people from using the forums.
Its far better to have a smaller number of ACTIVE forums with lively discussion.
Its a basic best bractice for a successful forum that you only dilute discussion into sub-forums when there is an overwhelming amount of discussion around a particular theme that is distracting and overwhelming the general varied discussion in the main forum.

My suggestions:

1 - Move 'Ideas and Suggestions' forum from 'Main' Category into 'Support' Category

2 - Move 'Important Information' forum from 'Main' Category into 'Support' Category'

3 - Get rid of 'MMA Competitions League' forum and put the couple of posts into the main 'MMA Competitions' forum

4 - Move that 'MMA Competitions' forum into the 'MMA Community' Category

5 - Delete the (now empty) 'Main' category

6 - Merge 'MMA ASIA Shows and Events' forum into the main 'MMA Shows and Events forum'

7 - Combine the following forums into a 'General MMA Discussion' forum (this would be the main forum - active, lively, thriving):

- MMA Polls
- MMA Video
- MMA Politics
- MMA Art
- MMA Dojo
- Comment on Instructionals
- Ask Away
- MMA Discussions

8 - Remove many of the forums from the 'Chillout Room' Category, and create threads for them in the 'General MMA Discussions' Forum. (For example - Recommend a movie does not need its own forum - its perfectly served by a single thread in a forum:

- Create a general 'Chill Out Room' Forum
- Merge the 'Games Section' into the 'Chill Out Room' forum
- Merge the 'Recommend a Movie' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'Jokes' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'News' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum
- Merge the 'Funny YouTube Clips' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'Post a Pic' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum and create a thread for that discussion
- Merge the 'Chit Chat Away' forum into the 'Chill Out Room' forum

9 - Move the new 'Chill Out Room' forum into the 'MMA Community' Category

10 - Delete the old 'Chill Out Room' Category


After all this the new forum structure would look like this:

CATEGORY: Support
- Important Information
- Ideas & Suggestions
- Support Forum
- Guides and How To's

CATEGORY: MMA Community
- General MMA Discussion
- MMA Competitions
- MMA Shows and Events
- MMA News
- MMA Events Ratings [NO SPOLIERS]
- MMA Events Discussion [SPOILERS]
- Chill Out Room



Greatly simplified, easier to navigate, less daunting for new users, and most importantly, will maintain a healthy level of activity in the forums.

there are alot of sub genres in the forum..i normally go to topics that are under the shoutboxs as the place is too big..or i check on threads i may have started. would love the forum to be more active.

This is what we're trying to improve:

Posts per day: 18.08
Topics per day: 3.72

If you remove the topics created by admins or mods, the stats would look more like:

Posts per day: 3
Topics per day: 0.5



Have your say people - if you dont agree with any of this, post a reply and explain why. Its a very important discussion to have, whatever the outcome.

I'm completely with subvertbeats on this one. I would also strip out a lot of the subforums and just keep the remaining areas a lot more active. Like jnrpepaseed, I also tend to only check the threads linked to in the Forum Latest Posts box on the front page, but at least then if the "action" was only one thread up in the forum it would only take me one or two clicks to go check what other threads are active at the moment. Right now I'd have to spend a couple of minutes clicking around and checking.

I'd even combine a few of the proposed new groups, just to further push the active threads closer together:

CATEGORY: Support
- Important Information (Guides and How To's) Have the FAQs/guides be stickies
- Support Forum (Ideas & Suggestions)

CATEGORY: MMA Community
- General MMA Discussion
- Competitions
- MMA Headlines (Upcoming Events and News)
- MMA Event Ratings [NO SPOILERS]
- MMA Event Discussions [SPOILERS]
- Chill Out Room

This way, all the news articles and upcoming show notices would be in one section, so very quick to check out other stories and see who's posting replies in other threads. Say the Latest Forum Posts box tells me the info for UFC whatever is coming up. I go there and read the show info, post up that I am excited about it and maybe reply to someone else's comment. Then I just need to click once to go up a level to see all the other threads with event news, fighter news, etc., and straight away I know from the red dots which other threads are active. One more click gets me into a second thread and I comment again...

Even better suggestion Ob, like it.

Obskewer why are you not a mod here?

Ben & co, great work!