As a longtime user and contributor to the Forums I have seen many changes to the Forums.
The paid Members Only Forum use to be divided up into multiple topics and in order to ask a question or to start a new discussion you would have to pick one of the topics to post your question or topic under. However, when viewing the posts, you could view all posts in all topics all at once (and in chronological order). This way users and contributors could always see the latest posts on the Forum regardless of what the topic of discussion was.
The first really big change to the Old Forum was to reorganize the topics and eliminate the ability to view all topics at once. This may have had little impact on users looking for information, but it had a huge impact on the contributors of that information. The people who contributed the most to the old Members Forums weren’t just experts on single topics. They, like AC, were fountains of information on all-things-Las-Vegas and they would just monitor all the threads under the view-all feature (or whatever it was called) and add their comments or answer questions on new posts as they showed up. This was easy for them to do because they only had to monitor the Forums in one place. It used to be if you asked a question, regardless of the topic, you would get an almost immediate helpful response.
After the changes, anyone who wanted to contribute information in any meaningful way would have to go to each individual Topic to see if there was anything of interest. This was no longer a fun way to contribute. It was work. As a result activity on the Members Forum dropped drastically.
I think at the same time the Free-For-All forum was created which also drew a lot of the traffic away from the paid area. It functioned more like the old Members Forum but it did not have a set of Las Vegas related topics for people to ask questions under so it truly became a free-for-all.
In my view the Free-For-All was much less helpful than the Members Forum because it was open to all manner of “crazies” and the quality of the Las Vegas information became unreliable and sporadic. It certainly drove more traffic to the website, so I can’t begrudge LVA for preferring this over the old forum, but then five years or so ago, the search engine broke and was never fixed. This made the Forums next to useless for finding useful information on Las Vegas.
Although I guess I am belly-aching a little in going over all this, I wanted to give this history before giving my suggestions or perhaps it should be called my wish list.
1) There should remain a paid Members Only area in the Forum which sticks exclusively to Las Vegas and gambling related topics.
2) Of course I prefer the old system where you had to post under a given topic but could view and respond to all posts on any topic from one “View All” area or option within the Forum. There must be a way to do this. I have never understood why we lost this functionality, but I am not a programmer.
3) If #2 truly can’t be done then do away with the topics and throw all the posts into one message board in the Members Forum. This will make it easier for contributors to contribute, and should work fine for users just as long as there is a good search function.
4) Have a good search function and make it easy to use. If you have a good search function, then you do not need to organize questions and discussions into topics. The user looking for information creates their own “topic” when they enter a search term. You don’t need topics.
5) I assume you want to keep the Free-For-All side of things. Maybe, as a way of luring people onto the paid side, you could also show the entries from the paid side on the Free-For-All, but not allow responses, and maybe not even show responses to the first post starting the thread. This could generate more interest to the paid side while also adding content to the free side.
I cannot address or even understand the technical issues my wish list creates but as both a user and a contributor I want a Forum which both makes it easy to contribute information on a broad range of topics while also allowing me to quickly find helpful information posted by other contributors. As a user, I want that latest information on what is going on in Las Vegas, but as a contributor I don’t want to have to go out of my way to find topics that I may have something useful to contribute to. As a contributor, I don’t know what I want to contribute in advance so don’t make me pick a topic.
