The Future... spin-off: Hosted Mod Forums

[Seasoned Alcoholic]

These are some good distinctions, and tbh distinctions are required to be in place to make sure every one has a fair chance of being given their own subforums. As mentioned by Dol Guldur, once an individual / modding team has been given the privilege of their own modding subforums, hopefully the penny should drop with regards to the responsibilities and commitment levels that a mod requires. It is frustrating for mod followers to see their mod update once every blue moon - once you've been given local moderation responsibility, you need to be responsible to keep everyone up-to-date with your project, but this is obviously at the developers' discretion.

I'll use my mod as an illustratory example in this discussion. RTG has topics at four different forums, including here @ ORG, TWC, SCC and .COM forums. Here's a link to each to illustrate:

ORG
TWC
SCC
.COM

As you can see, RTG has its own subforums @ TWC. It also has individual topics @ ORG, SCC & .COM forums. Obviously the individual topics are harder to update and consume more time because anything new should ideally be linked from the first post of the topic, so that readers can keep up-to-date on the mod's progress.

On the other hand, when you are given your own subforums, you then have the luxury of laying things out in a much more clearer way than the 1-topic-wonder: things soon become clustered and difficult to follow. If you've read the RTG topic here @ ORG, you'll see that I've jumped between various modding areas on numerous occasions - this is why it is crucial to use a progress list and keep news and announcements (with links) in the first post. Otherwise things easily become

----------

IMO, a major mod should have at least one forum site where it has subforum privileges. Then in any additional TW forums, a single topic is all that is required because you can simply copy and paste the latest news from your 'base' into the various single-topics (this is what I do anyway, you may call it laziness )

Exceptions could be made for truly unique projects, or ones which have a vast support base in numerous forums. It is only fair to mod followers to be able to quickly access information easily for these larger major projects, rather than read topic after topic (usually unrelated to each other) before they locate the news they're after.