Suggestion: far fewer forum sections

[MichelleJ]

This suggestion seems counter-intuitive, but please bear with me. 

Segmenting forums into so many sections has the effect of making the forums far less active and giving far less visibility to topics. Because everything is so highly segmented, threads that are actually active are seen by few people. In each forum I've looked at, only perhaps the top few threads are somewhat recently active, as in from the past week. Very few are recently active, as in they were last posted in today or yesterday. This gives the forum a dead, inactive vibe.

I've seen this effect in numerous forums. People request a new section, only to effectively kill off discussion of that topic since it is now hidden.

This forum simply isn't active enough now to require so many sections. It also is a turn-off to attracting and retaining new users, since the forum comes across as inactive. When people make a post and get no or few replies, they are discouraged from posting again. There are a number of topics I would have replied to, but they are way old/inactive. As well, this level of segmentation discourages people from posting topics that are Whole30 related, but don't fit into a particular section. 

If people are interested in a specific topic, that is what the search bar is for. At most, many of these could become a list of suggested tags while posting, and then links to interesting tags/searches such as women's health, athletes, kids, etc... 

I suggest limiting it to about 5 sections at most. Perhaps, About the Forum (rules, feedback, etc), Introductions/Commit, Logs, Whole 30 General Chat. Maybe one more. Maybe Success Stories, but that could have the effect of hiding them. It might work though, if there are only a few sections. 

Just a thought!