How can we make the forum more helpful?

[kresty]

Savage was asking me that the other day.

This forum was focused on the more esoteric droids - and was created before the more recent flurry of shows and a bunch of facebook groups.

I still think it's helpful to have a place for content - especially for the more esoteric droids.  That works best when lots of folks contribute

[MDC]

Are you seeking opinions for this forum going forward, or are you just re-affirming the purpose of this forum?

I don't normally post here, but use it for references, but lately I have much more time on my hands and have been looking for a project to keep busy. I could go the Astromech route but wanted something a bit different. That's where I see this place. Astromechs have a place regardless if it's an R-series or a BB type, but for anything else this is the place for me.

For the record I'm digging into the ODEX 1 for inspiration. I know it's not Star Wars, but that thing really should have been in the movies.

[kresty]

Are you seeking opinions for this forum going forward, or are you just re-affirming the purpose of this forum?

For the record I'm digging into the ODEX 1 for inspiration. I know it's not Star Wars, but that thing really should have been in the movies.

See if anyone has suggestions that could make it more useful, or affirm that folks are finding it useful. 

ODEX seems interesting... would probably exceed their film budget!

[Dyne]

I find it useful; I post here more often than I do on the more specific forums (Astromech, BB-8 and MSE clubs) right now.  

As all of the Facebook groups are of zero use to me, it's good to have a place for "other" droids outside of the walled garden.  To be honest, I think that droidbuilding diffusing into a bunch of tiny, tiny niche groups is kind of the reason nobody sees much traffic.  We need to coalesce the hobby a bit, and this site has the broadest remit of the four main builder forums.

The main thing I can think of to make the site more helpful, beyond just having more users (which is largely outside our control) is possibly doing a bit of reorganization.  

If it were me, I'd either put all of the build threads into the subforum for their type of droid and get rid of the builds subforum, or else put all of them in the builds subforum and leave the specific droid type sections for non-build information/discussion. Right now we have some builds in one place and some in the other (and some droid forums having subforums for build threads), even for the same kind of droid.  I can see arguments for either solution.  It's not a huge issue, but I can see the "some here, some there" approach being confusing to people.

Then again, no matter which solution is used, we'd need to address the proliferation of droid types ... and given that this site handles the more obscure droids, address what happens with a rare or one-off droid.  Does LD-F1 (or a hypothetical discussion thread) really belong in D-O's subforum, since that's what he's concept art for, even though he bears no resemblance to D-O ... or should he get his own?  What about the other Luke Fisher D-O concept, the one that looks like a cross between LD-F1 and the final droid in Rise of Skywalker?

Does 99-99 from the Visions S1e5 "The Ninth Jedi" also get his own forum?  CO3 from S1e6 "T0-B1"?  V-5 from S1e2 "Tatooine Rhapsody"?  E2 from S2e1 "Sith"?  Etc. etc.  At some point it might make more sense to put droids in subforums for particularly droid-heavy sources rather than specific droid types.

Anyway, just my rambling thoughts.