So... a suggestion, if you're determined to zotz 'Editorials and Other Articles"?

[EarlG]

3. I'd say we're broadly on the same page

Maybe replace it with something else that is oriented towards sharing links to and snippets of longer, broader, more in-depth reads, for those of us who like to find that stuff and occasionally like to discuss it, regardless of "Topic"?

That's not a bad idea... we could call it "Editorials & Other Articles"

Okay let me lay this out as I see it now. The root of this is that I would like more people to use the topic forums on DU4. We have a few forums that are really vibrant and fun, and a few forums which have some solid back-and-forth debates about issues, and they demonstrate the potential for community building in these smaller forums. But then we have this long-ass list of forums that are out of date or barely used. I want to give that section of the site a fresh start.

So I was considering Editorials & Other Articles to be partly responsible for taking attention away from the topic forums, because it's another "general" area of the site, so people are more likely to congregate there, causing them to ignore the other forums.

But, that's wrong for a couple of reasons. First, if people are more likely to congregate in a particular forum, I probably shouldn't kick them out of it and tell them to go elsewhere. That's not smart. Second, the topic forums don't actually serve as a good replacement for Editorials & Other Articles anyway -- they're two different things.

Many of the threads in Editorials could easily find a place in the Topic Forums, but many others are about pure politics, or other issues that don't fit neatly into a "topic," and which wouldn't have a meaningful home in any of the currently-existing Topic Forums.

AND there is value in having a one-stop-shop to find this kind of discussion. I get that you don't want to go searching through all the Topic Forums. The Topic Forums are for people who know what they're looking for, whereas the Editorials forum is for people who want to be surprised by something interesting from a large range of possible subjects (within the political sphere).

So all that said, I think that means we need to find a solution that involves keeping Editorials & Other Articles alive in some form (which might mean just keeping the forum). I will continue to think on it and am happy to receive further input.