by Aster » 29 Aug 2018, 4:33 pm
Hi all,
I’m giving some thought to breaking up the ‘centrefire rifle’ forum category, and would like to hear members thought on this.
This category is the largest on the site by a wide margin (1,400+ topics and 28,000+ posts at the time of writing), and while this growth is great, it does create some accessibility issues.
To briefly explain; the problem is that as new content is created, older content gets pushed deeper and deeper into the site, and this creates 2 issues:
1) Users simply don’t navigate through 40, 50, 60 etc. pages in a forum, so topics get viewed less the deeper they move into the forum.
2) Search engines follow similar logic, if content is “far away” from the home page in terms of navigation, it’s seen to be less important; it ranks less highly and brings in less visitors.
In a nutshell, the deeper topics are pushed, the more they are ‘forgotten’.
By splitting the forum into 2 categories, it would effectively bring a lot of topics “closer” to the homepage, removing a lot of the navigation required to reach them and alleviating both problems.
(We’ve just done this with the creation of the Rimfire rifle forum, moving content here from what was previously the combined centrefire and rimfire category.)
The question now, is how to divide it. I have a couple of trains of thought on this.
A) The most suitable solution to me seems to be a ‘large’ and ‘small’ centrefire forum. Where to draw the line on this is debatable, but I’m thinking a ‘6mm/.243 and larger’ and a ‘smaller than 6mm/.243’.
This would, in a way, group rifles by their intended purpose, e.g. cartridges in 6mm and larger are going to be used for hunting larger game, and longer distance target shooting, where cartridges smaller than 6mm are going to be used more for varminting and more moderate distance target shooting. Also recoil, cost etc.
B) The alternative is divide by action type. I know some forums do this, but in my mind the purpose and performance of a rifle is defined more by the cartridge it fires than its action. We also already have a ‘gunsmithing’ forum which is perhaps more suited to specific action questions anyway.
There is also the question of what to do with fringe action types; break-action rifle, breech-loading rifles etc. These are too uncommon to have a dedicated section of their own, and if you’re going to lump them in with another category then it defeats the purpose a bit.
Happy to hear alternative thinking on this, but option (A) resonates with me as the most appropriate solution.
I'm curious what other peoples thoughts are as far as categories go. What do you think?
See you on the firing line.