Thanks, Bowser, that was, as Tom said, a useful and well-written comment.

The move to a new server has been a mess. Tikiwiki was necessary to bootstrap the new site, because otherwise I would not have been able to recreate the original Windows-based software, on the new Linux server. I kept quiet about the circumstances at the time because of delicate business issues, but in fact the ISP that hosted the old server went out of business at the end of August, and that's what drove the move. I had about two weeks' notice, and believe me, I was scrambling.

Jody's right about getting rid of SickiWiki. Not that I can just toss it, since then we start over, and I really don't think that another package along similar lines will be any improvement. Tikiwiki's part of a general category called "CMS", or Content Management System, and they all work pretty much the same way and have the same faults.

But what I can do, starting this weekend, is to radically simplify the site by removing from view all the bells-n-whistles beyond forums. I won't be removing the features, such as blogs and file galleries; but I'll move the silly "Utility Closet" menu to a separate location. You only need it when you're creating something like a blog, otherwise it just clutters up the place and makes it seem more confusing.

I've learned more about how to customize tikiwiki, and I think I can return the site structure to something resembling the previous forum-centric Zone. I can make the forums the centerpiece and "home page" of each section, and hang the ancillary material such as file galleries from that page.

I was encouraged by your feedback on the Flash version, Bowser. I have high hopes for it. Right away I can use it to replace the forum interface, and over time I can move the useful features into it, in a kind of all-encompassing "Flash desktop". Or it can be packaged into little standalone widgets, which would allow y'all to roll your own interfaces, and place forums and chat etc. on other Web pages.

However, one argument for retaining tikiwiki, albeit in the background in a reduced role, is that Flash isn't for everyone, and the site requires a backup old-fashioned HTML interface. Kind of the way that the previous site had the second-generation "Nexus" plus preserved the first generation plain-HTML version as backup.

Sometime in the near future we need to make a final decision on the forum taxonomy. Science Fiction and MOTM are adhoc experiments...the boards just appeared during the setup phase, and people started using them. Since Zoners are using them, I think we should keep them; but maybe we should create a group of boards under an expanded "OffTopic" supercategory, to simplify navigation a bit.

I floated a similar proposal regarding CurrentEvents a while ago, to split off a child "Politics" board. I didn't get much feedback, but what I got was stereotypical: Tom wrote that everything is politics, so how can you separate politics from current affairs? I actually find that to be a good argument for the split, since it shows how thoroughly politics has corrupted so many aspects of life out there, and has polluted the discussion in here. Frankly, I question whether we've had any political discussions in a long, long time; what I see is a stylized Kabuki dance of smear and rebuttal, all noise and fury and lacking in substance. So if I don't get any better arguments against it than "everything is politics", I'm going to split a Politics board off from CE.

Also still up in the air is the final decision about what's public and what's members-only. There aren't five tiers of membership, there are really only two, inside and outside (Member and Anonymous). There's been some confusion caused by my experiments with a third tier, but I've abandoned that. We could, in theory, make all boards open to the public, using a system whereby moderators would have to approve anonymous (not logged-in) posts, but that's a serious burden on the mods, and I want to talk to them about that first.

So there ya go. Thanks again for the thoughtful post, Bowser. I hope it sparks more discussion of how to get out of the move-in phase and get back to normal.