I have in fact never suggested merging for activity in my history here. I have been doing the exact opposite by suggesting more varied boards that the rest of the staff was very against. It always came with a fight from other staff. Locke and Mases are the ones that only think mathematically with the forum and want it to be perfectly neat.
Well then we remember things differently. Because every time I've suggested this before, you were always a constant figure, always there, arguing for consolidation, not against, directly to me and in public places such as this. If you mean to say you've said differently to other staff where I can't see, then we have a difference of communication. As evidenced by you again repeating the same broken logic that more sections reduces activity:
But numbers don't lie, activity does drop like a rock when we have too much of a breakdown in board listings.
Uhm... except they don't? They drop after we merge things together. Considering how we never actually break things down like this in one big group, you can't say definitively that's what happens. We collect more sections very slowly over time, then we merge them en masse in large groups. With so many variables, it's very hard to gauge the exact effect that getting more sections has been doing. But it is very easy to see what effect merging them does because that's a more sudden drastic change. And besides, it literally cannot get any worse. Mases already considers the activity low enough warrant simply shutting down the forum and making it ZI's problem. And given that consolidation hasn't done anything for us, there's no reason to stay on the same path.
What's happening is people are just looking at individual sections and assuming they're going slower, even though overall activity is higher. Then when they are merged, that individual section looks like it is more active even though the overall total is less.
It's like if you have a two buckets that both hold three gallons. You think it's ugly to have two and you want just one, nice big bucket, but all you can have is a five gallon bucket. So you empty both of the three gallon buckets into the five gallon bucket. There's now five gallons of water in one place. It looks like it's more than either of the original two because it's five gallons instead of three. So mission accomplished? Right? Wrong. Your original total was six gallons, but since you could only accommodate five, you had to discard one gallon. it's gone. That's what we're doing with all this consolidation of forum sections and it is an illusion of more activity even though there's less.
or there will be hell to pay.
