One of the struggles that I've had with chainBB recently is where to put all the forums that are being requested by the community. Up until today, I was conflicted between the notion of "adding new forums for users" and "trying to keep the forum index uncluttered". Some sort of solution was required, and after some chatting with a number of individuals, bringing over the concept of a sub-forum seemed like the best approach.
Today sub-forums are now live!
Sub-forums from the Forum Index
The concept of sub-forums is pretty simple, it's that a forum can have a parent forum to live within. Traditional forum software has used this concept for decades at this point and it seems to work pretty well.
Before today, I had an entire "group" of forums dedicated to Steem. All 6 of the forums were displayed on the homepage and that took up a lot of room. With sub-forums (as shown in the screenshot below), the additional sub-forums for Steem now take up MUCH less space and now Steem can live alongside all of the other crypto forums.
It worked so well that I decided to mirror the same setup for Peerplays!
Sub-forums when viewing a Forum
You can also access these sub-forums from the parent forum, as shown in the screenshot below. You would access this page by clicking "Peerplays" from the forum index on the homepage.
This allows easy access to all of the sub-forums for that specific board and allows for infinite nesting of forums within one another.
A forum for Bitshares & Peerplays
https://beta.chainbb.com/forum/bitshares
https://beta.chainbb.com/forum/peerplays
Both Bitshares and Peerplays have strong communities already here on Steem, but that doesn't mean it can't be even stronger. Being siblings in the Graphene family I felt it was fitting for it to live right alongside it's brethren.
With Peerplays launching soon I setup the same type of forums as Steem (to coordinate witnesses & developers, etc), and I need to do a bit more research on exactly what would work best for the Bitshares community.
That's it for now, just a small update to help organize things a bit more. My focus is very much on organizing the data and not adding a lot of frills yet. Building the strong foundation of chainBB's UX is going to be critical for adoption.