[Raion]

I've recently retired the Nintendo 64 category, as it hasn't had activity in over a year. It has not been viable to keep around, so I've archived the entire forum in the Boneyard.


I have been meaning for a while to thin out/consolidate categories, but before I do so, I am very much opening this as an RFC.

We have four categories staying unconditionally:

Itanium

IBM

x86 boxes

Other UNIX

I would like to strongly eliminate one of the others, and would also be open to culling two total.

My thought was to combine Amiga/Commodore with the Atari forum into a 68k board and make it inclusive to 68k apple stuff, change IBM into a POWER/PowerPC forum and move PowerPC discussions from Apple there, and move the x86 Apple stuff into the x86 boxes category. That does however leave ARM out, which is problematic, so I'm hesitant especially on the latter category.

The other idea I had would be to make HP, Compaq and DEC merge into Itanium, and we can turn it into a HP Enterprise forum, covering all HPPA, Itanium, Alpha etc. including SGI's itanium stuff.

I am not currently open on my end to making the primary categories inclusive to itanium/sgi x86 boxes, because they're a very different design and don't have critical mass to warrant their own specific categories, but I don't wanna exclude them at all. It really was a problem IMHO at nekochan that the forums would mix IRIX and GNU/Linux /Itanium topics together and people who don't read titles/contents thoroughly (me included) would sometimes reply unhelpfully.

Therefore, my position as a staff member is we need to keep them separated. I'm aware not everyone agrees, and if there's really sufficient demand then I'll open it up to the other four staff to overrule me (per our rules, if two agree on a simlar position and the others don't take sides/abstain then we will reconsider our current status quo)

All this to say, I think we need to be vigilant to adapt to the changing conditions of our site and make changes as necessary.

Discuss below or PM me, Kaigan, Dexter1, Micrex22 or Dodoid with any thoughts if you wanna share privately. We have a policy as staff that if a user comes to us privately, we won't identify them by name unless it's absolutely necessary (i.e. if someone is reporting harassment or something)