"This is why more boards are not always the best idea." Topic

I always check the Napoleonic Discussion Board to see any interesting topics and/or ones that have attracted a lot of posts.

I never check any rules specific boards. Then I click on the Empire board by accident and there is a huge discussion, the OP being "Where abouts of GdB Picquet's Brigade Jun16, 1815?"

This is not a Empire specific topic. But because it wasn't crossposted to Napoleonic Board, a lot of people who do not play Empire, showed up to the party late.

Well it shows it was posted to the Napoleonic Discussion Message board. But I don't see anything on the Napoleonic Discussion board with 333 posts on it. If it is there I don't see it.

Looking at the topic in question, the last post was made on the 25th of June. If you scroll back through many pages of archives in Napoleonic Discussion you will find it when you finally get back to June.

Heavily trafficked boards have things fall of the bottom of the page much more rapidly than others. This is why more specific boards makes it so much easier to find older topics on specificky topics. You were lucky this was also cross-posted to Empire where it hasn't fallen off the bottom of the page!

I'm an old coot. Once a topic falls off the front page I have trouble finding it again because there are so many boards, too many.

If you can't find it, then it's not bothering you any more.

if a topic falls off the front page, it has
become unworthy of my attention.

What is the alternative?

Having tons of rules specific questions clogging up the board so you can't find anything or moving to tagging so when someone tags their post with "Empire" and not "Napoleonics" you still can't find it?

The posts would fall off the front page regardless of how many boards there are.

Finding posts related to specific games and periods is rather helpful for those of us who like to look up specific topics.

I prefer it. I read every Empire thread but do not read every Napoleonics thread. Some are just silly.

the forum actually has a decent search feature. One could easily type "Empire" or whatever and see the latest posts with that in the topic line

One could easily type "Empire" or whatever and see the latest posts with that in the topic line

Which would not include all posts about the Empire game and would include lots of posts unrelated to the Empire game.

Ultimately, computers cannot do semantic analysis, so you need people doing the sorting. Boards or tags are functionally the same, but operationally, boards require the user to think (or at least make one deliberate choice) up front where tags kind of encourage the user to think after the fact.

Worse yet your topics can run off the board real quick with posts that bump it down. Wargaming is a niche hobby with many niches – niche on I say!!