Organization of these new forums.

 As I understand it, they are still in the process of selecting and appointing moderators for these new forums.  I would suggest to the incoming moderators organizing the forums as follows:

 

The Austrian Network:

    Category-----Economics

        Forum-----Austrian Economics

        Forum-----Neo-Classical Economics

        Forum-----Keynesian Economics

        Forum-----Monetarist Economics

        Forum-----Socialist Economics

   Category------Political Theory

        Forum-----Anarcho-Capitalism

        Forum-----Minarchism

        Forum-----General Libertarianism

        Forum-----Politics & Current Events

   Category------Administration

        Forum-----General Admin & Help

        Forum-----Introductions

        Forum-----General Discussions <anything that is off topic for the other forums>

 

I think this would be a good setup.  Enough forums to organize topics efficiently, yet not too many forums as to be a pain to navigate.  Just my humble opinion. 

I don't think it would be pragmatic to have so many economics forums, or at least not divided by school, since the schools of economics will likely be compared and contrasted to one another more often than not.

I've no problem with your political theory forums, though.

I think the division of the economics boards is interesting, but I do think it's inappropriate. Perhaps a more appropriate division would be a single doard for topics on/about Austrian thoery, a board for other schools, and a board for topics about Austrian and other schools.

If that division seems unequipped to deal with the purpose of the board, perhaps an Austrian section with a board for elaboration, a board for questions, and a board for criticism, and a seperate set of boards (same purposes) about other schools.

My proposal is much simpler: just one forum, and call it the mises.com forum or whatever.

So there's no need to worry about what category is right.

One thing I've noticed in my experience with forums is that the people generally pick the area of the board that will become the general purpose board... so everyone ends up posting in X with a few people in Y and Z. 

That isn't to say it might not be worthwhile to have only one forum heading or many forum headings, but I do imagine it will largely work itself out, market style.

A General forum could be useful though. 

I agree with jsh - trying to break up forums into categories is too much central planning.  I much prefer the dynamic, self organizing approach.

I've been a member of a forum of football fans for 12 years now - when a techie took control of the forum and started "organizing" it into categories, it lost some of its sense of community.  Off-beat topics were shuffled over to an "off topic" area that no one ever visited.  Eventually, we just started ignoring the categories and put it all back in one area.

 BTW, I'd like to suggest that we add a "forum jump" link to the bottom of the page.  When I enter a topic area and read to the bottom of the page, I have to scroll back up to the top to jump up a level.

1)  Eliminate all the tags that say "Forum" in your message.

 2)  Change "Category" to "Forum"

 There, done, just those three will do nicely.  Talking about this in regards to forums is similar to talking about division of labour, too much division and there simply isn't enough demand to satisfy all the relevant categories, and people often get confused about what to post in, and cross-topical conversations become limited.

 Is there a way to go into a thread and have it put me where I left off (as in, takes me to the first new post since I was last in the thread?)

I think that would requre a lot of additional logging.  The forum does allow you to jump to the latest post on the thread.

Could you add a "bump" capability to the blog list on the mises.org homepage. I'd like a way to keep threads from dropping off the list when they are still active. 

Just a filter that looks for the word "bump" as the first word in the post and, when found, moves the thread back to the top of the list. 

 

 

Perhaps a history forum could be appropriate, since that's another branch of education (economics on political theory being the other two) that the Ludwig von Mises Institute promotes.  Question is: is it necessary or useful, or is it better for such topics to be absorbed into the other two fora?