Adding a "Skyrim Discussion" Subforum - Your Thoughts

[Tom]

Hello everyone,

We have been contemplating adding a "Skyrim Discussion" subforum to the Elder Scrolls Games forum (just as we have an "Oblivion Discussion" subforum there), and we would like to hear from the community about your thoughts on this idea.

Here's what is holding us back: Even though Skyrim is to be released in the coming weeks and discussion regarding Skyrim is sure to kick up on forums around the Web then, we fear that The Elder Stats forums are not active enough to see a good amount of discussion regarding Skyrim. Currently, we have a few topics on Skyrim in the general "Elder Scrolls Games" forum, and one concern of ours is, if we do create a subforum for Skyrim Discussion just as we did for Oblivion, that it would not see much activity until after we launch support for Skyrim characters on The Elder Stats. Also, since we do not yet support Skyrim characters on The Elder Stats, should we wait until Skyrim support is launched to make such a subforum?

These may seem to be somewhat trivial questions to others, but we do worry about creating a Skyrim Discussion subforum and having it see very little activity due to our currently inactive forum community. We are hopeful that the release of support for Skyrim characters to be posted to The Elder Stats later this Winter will help to draw more new members to the website and the forums, but until then it isn't likely that we'll see a great deal of discussion about Skyrim on here, given the current activity level of our forums.

So, we open the floor to you. Should we create a Skyrim Discussion subforum and, if so, when should we create it? We thank you in advance for your feedback.

[Ysmir]

My thought are yeah, go ahead and put it up now. Although the new dynamics of Skyrim will have to be introduced into the elder stats, something that's obviously been considered, I think the quicker the new Skyrim system is active, the quicker we'll have the increased traffic mentioned in the OP.

My 2 cents

[The Ninja]

Yeah, we definitely need one now.

[Tom]

Seeing that a lot of you think this is a good idea, we've now added a Skyrim Discussion subforum to the forums, located here: viewforum.php?f=21.

We've moved a few Elder Scrolls V-related topics from the general Elder Scrolls Discussion forum into the new Skyrim subforum, but the question remains of what to do with the fairly large "The Elder Scrolls V" topic sitting in the general Elder Scrolls Discussion forum. What do you all think we should do about it? Should we: 1) lock the topic and say to post new discussions regarding Skyrim as individual topics in the new Skyrim subforum, or 2) make the current "The Elder Scrolls V" topic into a sticky topic in the new Skyrim subforum and it can become a sort of general topic for posting any kind of brief information that isn't important enough to warrant its own individual topic?

Please give us some feedback on this decision, as we don't want to make that 16+ page topic suddenly unavailable when it could, in fact, be useful as a "general Skyrim" sticky topic. Thanks, as always, for your input.

[whoman69]

Option 2 is probably the best choice. I would lock that as well actually.

[The Ninja]

I like option 2, but wether it be locked or not, I do not care.

[Tom]

Thanks for your input, guys.

Our goal with the new Skyrim subforum is to encourage people to post new topics in there about specific subjects of discussion regarding Skyrim. However, we do not think it would be best for a new topic to be created for every single subject of discussion, including those that are very minute details which really are related to the game as a whole rather than a specific subject. This is why I believe that it would be best to keep "The Elder Scrolls V" topic unlocked as a sticky to be used for posting general news and information regarding Skyrim. However, I don't want that large, general topic to deter people from posting new topics in the Skyrim forum (when it's necessary to have a separate topic on an issue), enticing them to choose to post in the general sticky topic instead.

Here's what I think would be best: Make the current "The Elder Scrolls V" topic a sticky in the Skyrim subforum and leave it unlocked for now to serve as a reference topic for general Skyrim things. If we notice that people are relying too much on that topic and posting in that topic more than in the subforum itself, then we may choose to lock it permanently. I don't want to make this into a bigger issue than it really is (although I fear that I've already done so ), so we will just go with this method for now and time will tell if we have to take action in the future.

[The Ninja]

Sounds good, sir. *salute*