Possible restructuring of fxguide forums?

[andrewhake]

I love fxguide.com. For quite some time now it has been many people’s home for news and info about what is happening in our industry. This includes multiple vfx sites and their very own news feed. What is great about fxguide is that it is a source, not an aggregator.

Just like the Reduser.net forums, all good discussion boards tend to be backed by a solid topic and built in source of new info. With the user base that already exists here and the many vfx artist looking for a new home for discussion after the garbage that has been happening at other sites (ask for clarification if needed), there is a great opportunity to update/simplify the fxguide forums.

There are just man topics here that have never been used, some that relate to “Art of…” posts Chapters as well as others. I think simplifying it to the basics would be fantastic:

Just a few main topics…

INDUSTRY
-news
-films/commercials
-jobs

TOOLS
-Software packages subforums (keep this updated and remove unnecessary or little used topics)
-Hardware
-Workflow

TECHNIQUES
-Cinematography, Matte Painting, Compositing, Animation, Roto, Rendering, Stereography, Modeling, Rigging, so on and so forth. Keep topics combined until they need to be separated into unique sub forums.

LOUNGE
-off topic

FXGUIDE
-site questions, suggestions, news, etc.

Develop a nagging system that asks/makes people tag their posts if it is a new thread. Put together a top notch search and FAQ.

The general idea here is, keep it simple, the more buried a discussion topic is, the less people are going to see it. A question about Roto, maybe is better suited to be in a Compositing forum (properly tagged, with suggested tags built into the system) instead of a Compositing/Roto forum. At least until people start to have very specific Roto discussions. If things are tagged, these existing topics can easily be moved.

Anyway, I know you guys are incredibly busy, but thought if you wanted a new challenge to tackle 😉 There is a huge opportunity here.

Thanks!

[Author]

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