Auditing your forum structure is when you look at each category, board, and sub-board to determine if it still has a need to exist. You might remove sections, add new sections, and modify sections for clarity.
If you do audit your forum structure, how do you go about doing it? What are you looking for? And how often are you doing it?
Every few years on Christianity Haven I'll look and see what needs to be changed. We currently have a few forums that aren't active, but I'd hate for users to lose that information that's within them, so I leave them alone. I could probably do more to promote those sections, but I don't know if it's a waste of my time.
I need to do this on Thee Zone. I've got way too many sub forums, I thought about maybe getting rid of the current events/debate section since it's not being used. I've also been meaning to get the forum plugin for the clans plugin I have installed so I can move some of the sections over to that to declutter the forum.
I never did it very often, but when I did, I wouldn't completely remove everything. I'd just merge things together in a manner that made sense that way the discussions could continue. Before I'd do it, I'd try to get discussions going in those sections, but if it didn't work out, then merging them into one, more active section was more ideal. Once that was done, I'd still try to promote those discussions in the new board to make sure people still knew it was an option to discuss those topics, even if they weren't in their own board.
