Reality
Staff member
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After a lot of thought and consideration of the votes and comments made by many of you in the recent poll thread, we have decided to restructure our main forums on CowboysZone.
General Notes
I know that half of the users on CowboysZone wanted the Fan Zone and the News Zone forums merged. The truth is, so did I until I thought about it a lot more.
Having one main forum works well for smaller, lower traffic forum sites, but on high traffic sites like CowboysZone, having one main forum causes a lot of good threads to drop off the first page which is a death sentence to most threads.
It also creates the situation where the staff has to be overly picky about which threads are allowed to remain in the main forum. A good example would be the "Dallas Cowboys Madden Ratings" thread in the Fan Zone right now. While not everyone plays that game, there are a lot of users who would not only want to see the ratings but also discuss them. Normally, we would have moved that thread to the Off-topic Zone simply because it was not technically a real Dallas Cowboys team discussion.
Now of course there are those of you who care nothing about Madden (I do not play it either) that will chime in with, "Who cares!?!?" but that was just one example. There are many others I could point out such as the DirecTV, cheap tickets, first time going to a game, etc. threads. Ultimately, everyone will have threads they cared about moved to other forums even though in some small way they were Cowboys related.
There are also a lot of CZ users who due to work, school, family, etc. have very little time to visit the site at least throughout most of the day. There are a lot more mobile users too these days who either have bandwidth limits or slow connections and having to wade through non-news threads just to get the latest news on the Cowboys is painful and annoying.
By allowing all members to create news related threads in the News Zone, we hope to see an increase in the number of news threads and replies to those threads as well. If you voted to merge the Fan Zone and Daily Zone forums, I ask that you keep an open mind and give this new forum structure a chance. A lot of users who wanted the two forums kept separate were the same ones who hated when we split the Fan Zone into two forums long ago. Sometimes, you just have to give something a chance and see how it works out. You might be surprised at the results
-Reality
General Notes
- The Daily Zone and Media Zone forums have been merged together to form the News Zone.
- The News Zone forum is for News, Video, Tweet, Recap, etc. threads only.
- Please post all news threads in the News Zone! Help reduce the work the staff has to do!
- Remember to NOT post full articles! We cannot allow full articles to be posted for legal reasons!
- The default sorting method for the News Zone is now Last Post Date just like the Fan Zone. You can override this if you prefer the old sort method of Thread Post Date using the Sort options at the bottom left of the page.
- All members can now post in the News Zone but please remember to only post news related threads in that forum!
I know that half of the users on CowboysZone wanted the Fan Zone and the News Zone forums merged. The truth is, so did I until I thought about it a lot more.
Having one main forum works well for smaller, lower traffic forum sites, but on high traffic sites like CowboysZone, having one main forum causes a lot of good threads to drop off the first page which is a death sentence to most threads.
It also creates the situation where the staff has to be overly picky about which threads are allowed to remain in the main forum. A good example would be the "Dallas Cowboys Madden Ratings" thread in the Fan Zone right now. While not everyone plays that game, there are a lot of users who would not only want to see the ratings but also discuss them. Normally, we would have moved that thread to the Off-topic Zone simply because it was not technically a real Dallas Cowboys team discussion.
Now of course there are those of you who care nothing about Madden (I do not play it either) that will chime in with, "Who cares!?!?" but that was just one example. There are many others I could point out such as the DirecTV, cheap tickets, first time going to a game, etc. threads. Ultimately, everyone will have threads they cared about moved to other forums even though in some small way they were Cowboys related.
There are also a lot of CZ users who due to work, school, family, etc. have very little time to visit the site at least throughout most of the day. There are a lot more mobile users too these days who either have bandwidth limits or slow connections and having to wade through non-news threads just to get the latest news on the Cowboys is painful and annoying.
By allowing all members to create news related threads in the News Zone, we hope to see an increase in the number of news threads and replies to those threads as well. If you voted to merge the Fan Zone and Daily Zone forums, I ask that you keep an open mind and give this new forum structure a chance. A lot of users who wanted the two forums kept separate were the same ones who hated when we split the Fan Zone into two forums long ago. Sometimes, you just have to give something a chance and see how it works out. You might be surprised at the results
-Reality