posted 18 years ago
I think there are two cases where we would consider creating a forum:
1) an existing forum is getting a lot of traffic on a subtopic and we should divide it.
2) there is a new-ish technology and somebody is of the opinion "if we build it, they will come." combined with at least one person that has a plan on getting stuff started. This would be not only posting three to six posts a day to get discussion going, but actively recruiting folks for a few weeks to get it going. Sometimes we can arrange some authors (complete with book promos) or big wigs to hang out for a while. The thing is, it can be a lot of work to get a forum going and folks generally just don't understand how much work it would be. So we create the forum, it sorta does nothing, and then it turns out to be a waste of space.
I dunno - this question gets asked enough, maybe it could be FAQ fodder?