Overhaul of D&D

As far as I understand, we're keeping the D&D parent forum for structural reasons. The D&D forum is currently f9, and changing that would mean getting the admins to change all the links around the site and it would generally cause too many disruptions. We've discussed the idea of using the main forum for posting up stickies, rules and dumping threads where we'll later allocate into a different subforum. We're not sure whether we want people posting in the parent forum when most threads can be placed in the 'culture forum'. So there are various ideas for the D&D parent forum.

RE: Your 'History' section. We've noted it. We're not sure how popular such a forum would be. Whilst I'm personally all in favour of historical debate, we haven't really seen a substantial number of threads specifically discussing historical events - perhaps the odd Hiroshima debate amongst the predictable debate on the existence of Israel. I'm not too confident that creating a specific forum for it would substantially increase the number of historically themed threads.

FAO: Dionysus. The name of the 'Rigorous Forum' may be changed.

This brings up an interesting point though. If Greg makes a rigorous thread (assumptions, numbered arguments that logically follow, anticipation of some attacks) on the problem of evil, is it supposed to go into theology or into rigorous debate? And/or are you going to allow him to post it in both?

Not being able to adhere to basic etiquette, i.e not interfering in long debates between two people, bad spell and grammar ect - Variable

Once again it is highly disappointing to see another reshuffle without a science and technology/environment area. These are very important issues that we should be debating, not ignoring.

We did consider science-specific and history-specific subforums in D&D; but for now I guess they'll have to find an appropriate subforum in the ones listed. Users may not have the specific knowledge to engage in those sorts of subject-specific debates, but those threads can be found within the other subforums.

There really isn't an appropriate subforum, that's why science threads end up in religion, which is silly, or debate on this area is stifled due to lack of provision.

Yeah, I think you do have a good point, and it's certainly something worthy to be considered, in my opinion. I know, for example, that there's an official 'Evolution' sticky in 'Theology', which shouldn't strictly be there unless it's solely concerned with how theists reconcile their faith to current, well-established scientific theories. I guess that social/cultural will have to do for now. I would add that I haven't seen very many debates which require a very specific amount of scientific knowledge, but for debates such as "Can the XYZ injection contribute to increasing the risk of heart attacks?", I think an science-specific academic forum would be a more fruitful environment, since they understand the methodology, the causation and the key concepts which need to be discussed. Granted, you could probably say the same for some of the economic debates here, or historical debates; so I guess I'm in two minds about the issue

We did consider science-specific and history-specific subforums in D&D; but for now I guess they'll have to find an appropriate subforum in the ones listed. Users may not have the specific knowledge to engage in those sorts of subject-specific debates, but those threads can be found within the other subforums.

How about a forum for 'Intellectual Discussion' with subforums for science and history or something? I've noticed this is something TSR is missing.