A long time ago... it was just before Web 2.0 (quiz, how many of you even know/remember what Web 2.0 was?) I had a successful (defined by unique visitors and page view etc stats) web site and also I unceremoniously closed down (also gave a 1 week notice) due to ... well... I just got tired of running it.
That experience taught me a lot: you can't build a website/community just by throwing up a
perfect structure and expect it will come alive and thrive. A community depends on contents contributors who are in reality
selfless servants and
brain-damaging drone work. Here a bit of a problem is that there are structure builders (
@CoolKevin and
@chompy) and there are content contributors (
@Yipman ,
@tentenkoko etc) but it's not clear they are interacting enough. And then here in AV discussion we (
@jugulear ,
@Supmop etc) talk alot but it's like we are also isolated from those two groups.
The problem with
@201flyer suggestion is to encourage enforce the torrent/DD posters to play along. So someone like a supermoderator either has to punish the non-compliant posters, or manually move the posts into proper (by month + studio) threads. It would only work if
@201flyer get in touch with the top posters (>50% of the posts) and get them all on the same page and make this the "mainstream" practice for at least a couple months, then say a new posters arrive and see that everybody does it this way and he will automatically follow the pattern.
Or... as I said, a supermoderator has to do this drone work for quite a long time to establish and even to maintain the ground rules.
IMHO, a forum is simply a weird way to get my AV and hentai and media downloads. I follow the daily or weekly new releases from all studio (with or without any torrent and/or DD links) from various blogs or database (I have a favorite one database, but there are so many highly similar choices). Every week I check the new release once or twice or four times, averaging out to maybe 20-30 minutes a week. 'cause it takes my eyes about 2 seconds per vid to reject 90% of them (just from the thumb-size cover image; but the icon-size image on AO sub-forum view is too small to make that decision) and then for those 10% non-rejected, it's another 10-30 sec to go over each per-vid page (with standardize data and frame images)
There's no log-in, each new release is presented in a highly visible and consistent format (of course they are all rip from the same source DMM). And dead easy to one-click to any actress-, studio- or genre- centric aggregates. For the actual torrents, sometimes these sites isn't enough, then I take the DVD code to kat.cr or even Google. And pretty much I get everything I need faster than logging on to AO, browsing the right sub-forum and/or searching the posts. For hentai, anime and Hollywood films, I also visit other sites/search engines for faster, more comprehensive and consistent result.
No I'm not knocking AO at all. Given that there are enough users who prefer to use a forum for sharing downloads, these's a reason AO exists and even thriving. Clearly certain things are working well, so well perhaps there's not much room to do minor tweaks and finetuning. But there are many many people (myself and many other) who don't ever go to the torrent/DD sub-forums. And ... really I don't see how any minor or not-so-minor changes to the forum can ever fix that.
So I'd say, leave well enough alone. It's not perfect, not by far. But instead of talking about changes here, why not do it and show it? Like
@CoolKevin said, the structure is all there, the existing rules are fine. Someone could just start posting torrent/download based on his idea how to organize
A lot of the "suggestion" doesn't require any more structure, it just waiting for contributors to put in contents. Another example, there's no point to make a new forum and rule to limit pix per post to 10 if we are not steadily getting image-based posts.
As to the structure builders, my humble suggestion is to get more help: recruit the top contributors (e.g. I nominate
@jugulear ) to be moderators, grant them mid-management power and responsibility. They would help with the day-to-day drone work of sub-forum management. E.g. by making better use of
sticky threads.