The admins have been discussing condensing the forums here on TORC. Back in 1999, we had just a few forums, but in 2000 we had an explosion of growth in memberships and posts. So many people were posting that one would have to go through three or four pages to find just one day's new threads. This necessitated increasing the number of forums, and making them more specific. Now that the movies are well in the past, and many people have migrated to facebook and left the old lands of Message Boards, we find we have too many forums and too few posts. Discussion was inhibited in the past by not enough forums. Today it's the opposite. Discussion is inhibited by too many forums. We are a handful of people living in a house built for a thousand.
And so the admins are starting the work of condensing the board. Forums that have not had use in some time are being archived. They are not being deleted; you can still read them in the archive section. Discussion, however, will be limited to the remaining non archived forums.
While it is an easy decision to archive forums where no one has posted in years, it's more difficult to make the decision to archive forums where people still occasionally post. While the admins will make the final call, we do want to get input from the members.
Some forums may be merged. For example, we can condense the Tolkien Movie forums into one "Tolkien: Movies and Media," which would contain discussion of all the films and other productions, as well as Art. Movies (other) can become "Movies and Media: Other" This could also be merged with the Music forum, although that could also merge with "Talk."
Please let us know your feelings about merging and archiving the forums. If the board grows again, we can always add a new forum or dust off an archived forum.