We would like to announce, that until the end of the year 2006, and continuing in 2007, our moderation team will work on arranging the miniBB.com forums. You can notice some old topics appearing at the top of Latest Discussions, but that only mean we're mergeing topics and/or moving messages.

After about 4 years of maintaining miniBB forums we've decided to make more optimized and well accessible structure. We see that most users are too lazy to search the forums and are not able to find the questions, which were discussed a lot of times already. That way we hope to organize information in more native way, and avoid the topics we don't like to see on our forums anymore.

Mostly, we have only renamed old forums and filled them in with new titles; however, two new forums will be available from this time. They are Official Addons and Solutions (dedicated to all our addons stuff, each topic per each addon/solution) and Custom Tutorials and Modifications (collection of code snippets, which were not published in Downloads, but may be useful for other users).

We hope you enjoy new structure - the progress is started!

Thanks, Team, your effort is appreciated! :-)
- mb

1 year and 9 months were passed since we published this thread and initiated the forums cleaning, and now we are proud to say: IT'S FINISHED. It was a long story and it seems we have moved to the new domain already, so this topic's title doesn't really correspond to the recent updates :-) Anyway...

Maintaining miniBB forums for more than 6 years, I personally learned two things:

1) Any forum should be maintained and moderated instantly to achieve good results for years and a qualified content. If you take a look at "major" boards which have millions of posts, that's not their good sign, because as soon as you start to rack these forums searching for some certain subject, you can't find anything easily.

2) Forum topics should always reflect subject of the community itself. If there are appearing some topics which are related to specific problems or questions which might not be interesting for anybody else, it's better to collect such topics in a different forum, warning the users this forum may not be compliant with what they are looking for. That way in the future such forum can be easily emptied, or just kept separately from the main forums content, still helping to locate some topics.

Initially our approach was to create a "Trash Can" forum and move all topics there, which are not compatible with out forum rules. That means, if some topic was not really related to miniBB itself, but to the custom task, or if the question was answered already. That has gained some negative response from some persons which weren't able to understand why their topics came to this forum. Finally we have created two trashed forums naming them "Specific" and "Re-cycled". We will also not hide the content of these topics from Google anymore - so visitors can a chance to locate the precise solution even finding the "trashed" thread. We think that would be much better for those who search.

We hope you will enjoy this.

That's true. If users notice the forum is loosely moderated, all topics tend to go off-topic and useless in the end. Moderator should skim each and every post and then edit or move/remove off-topic messages to do a good job.