I know we all bitch and moan about the joecigar/cigarsintl banter but apparently there is something about it that we all love. I tried to keep this forum very simple, in much the same vein. It's about creating a community. Cigarsintl has roughly 4500 members but there have been about 900,000 posts to date. Cigar.com on the otherhand has nearly 4 times as many members but only a quarter of the posts combined within its many threads. Not everyone is interested in every post and that's fine... Don't read 'em. That's not to say that I won't create or give you the ability to create sub forums. I'm just not there yet.
I don't think you should bother with sub-forums. What we like about the Banter is that it's a single channel of communication. At any given time, someone may not care for the topic of conversation, but we like the people talking so we hang. The problem with the world at large is that we have established so many options that no one ever has to listen to anyone say something they don't like. You can change the channel, or you can go to a club that plays the music you like, or you can live your life in the blue light of a computer monitor and avoid real people. But the inevitable result is boredom. When you only listen to what's offered in the forum which you choose to inhabit, you inevitably get bored. This group of people is one of two groups I bother with online. The other is a bunch of guitar players that started out on an e-mail listserv talking about Mesa/Boogie amplifiers. When that got stale it became a discussion of gear in general, and then we turned it into a Google group. Like this group, it's a small group of mostly older guys with a lot of experience and expertise, who actually welcome new people even if we give them and each other a hard time. And like this group - at least so far - each daily conversation is a single thread. Personally, I think it should stay that way. Ruthlessly simple, practical, and uncensored.
