So right now our forums relating to mapping are somewhat scattered all over the place, with Ranking Criteria under General Development, Mapping Techniques under Gameplay & Rankings, and questions/SBing/queues under WIP. The problem only gets worse if you start looking at where specific topics are; we have tutorials on things in both the main WIP forum as well as General Questions and Storyboarding, while changes to the Ranking Criteria are mostly stickies under Pending Beatmaps.
My suggestion is to create a separate forum for Mapping between where Gameplay & Rankings and Skinning is right now, and re-organize as follows:
Ranking Criteria -> Subforum under Mapping forum
Mapping Techniques -> Rename to "Rate the Mapping Technique" -> subforum under Mapping forum. Unofficial topics are moved to the main Mapping forum (e.g. t/157289, t/101435, t/78919).
General Questions -> Merge into Mapping forum
Storyboarding -> Subforum under Mapping (could also merge into Mapping; activity is generally quite low here)
Modding Queues -> Subforum under Mapping
Beatmap Projects -> Subforum under Mapping
And then we can scour the rest of the forums for announcements and things to move to the new forums, like the current stickies in Pending Beatmaps and WIP.
This would give us a place to talk about mapping in general and make topics related to mapping much easier to find. It would be also be nice to have the Beatmap forums dedicated to BSS submission topics; never made much sense to put the discussion subforums under WIP beatmaps.
Comments?
tl;dr: Make a new forum for mapping discussion, and move all mapping-related topics/forums there so that they're not scattered all over the place.
My suggestion is to create a separate forum for Mapping between where Gameplay & Rankings and Skinning is right now, and re-organize as follows:
Ranking Criteria -> Subforum under Mapping forum
Mapping Techniques -> Rename to "Rate the Mapping Technique" -> subforum under Mapping forum. Unofficial topics are moved to the main Mapping forum (e.g. t/157289, t/101435, t/78919).
General Questions -> Merge into Mapping forum
Storyboarding -> Subforum under Mapping (could also merge into Mapping; activity is generally quite low here)
Modding Queues -> Subforum under Mapping
Beatmap Projects -> Subforum under Mapping
And then we can scour the rest of the forums for announcements and things to move to the new forums, like the current stickies in Pending Beatmaps and WIP.
This would give us a place to talk about mapping in general and make topics related to mapping much easier to find. It would be also be nice to have the Beatmap forums dedicated to BSS submission topics; never made much sense to put the discussion subforums under WIP beatmaps.
Comments?
tl;dr: Make a new forum for mapping discussion, and move all mapping-related topics/forums there so that they're not scattered all over the place.