Here's why I think they only copied the general Demigod subforum to ImpulseDriven:
ImpulseDriven isn't meant to be the be-all, end-all forum for all of the games that we have developed/published. What it's supposed to be is a generic "starter" forum. We put the Demigod General forum in there so that people who aren't big Demigod fans can chat about it. Those who wish to delve deeper into Demigod will go to the Demigod site, which will have more forums for discussion.
A valid argument. But even so if this is your argument then why would not only the GalCiv II forum be copied but also 4 of its 11 subforums along with the GalCiv Dev Journals for good measure. What's so special about those particular GalCiv II subforums? And then similarly why would the Stardock Games forum (
http://forums.impulsedriven.com/forum/171) and the individual game forums underneath be so different on Impulsedriven than the identical Stardock Games forum that exists on the SD site (
https://forums.stardock.com/forum/171)?
I think the issue here is that you're trying to find consistency and some form of order in a system that was not designed that way.
Of that there is no doubt.
As I said before, the forums were meant to be completely separate sites sharing a similar codebase.
I think you intuit way more forethought than actually exists. Saying that the forums were “meant” to be such and such implies both a plan and a methodology for executing that plan. In my opinion the separate forums started out separate and they simply evolved haphazardly ever since, gradually over time becoming more intertwined.
As you say these forums (except for the GalCiv1 forum which is a true orphan) share a similar codebase but it’s clear that they do more than that. They also share the *identical* database. The Off-topic forum is forum/412 at *all* sites on which it exists, no matter *where* in the hierarchical structure of that site it exists. Same thing with threads/articles *all* of which are accessible from *every* site even if the forum in which it’s contained is not otherwise accessible on a particular site.
For example you can go to *any* of Stardock’s forum sites and enter in the thread/article number and you can view and reply to posts that you could otherwise not see on that site. For example https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/349 is the Off-Topic forum that I’ve mentioned before. If you were to try and access this forum from WC i.e. https://forums.wincustomize.com/forum/349 you wouldn’t get the Off-Topic forum but would instead get a list of forums that are in some way “invisible” on WC (the whole invisible forum thing is a different discussion).
However taking a thread that’s contained in this Off-Topic forum as an example, https://forums.galciv2.com/348670, you can simply enter the article number from the WC site, https://forums.wincustomize.com/348670, (or any other SD site) and you can access and even respond to the thread even though it’s not otherwise visible on the site nor would that thread ever get listed in WC’s recent posts list.
To add even more confusion to this already confused situation you can consider the subtle differences in how “threads” are treated when created, accessed and replied to from a forum versus how an “article” is created, accessed and replied to from a “blog”. But blog articles and forum threads are totally identical and can be accessed and manipulated interchangeably by both forum and blog functions. Yet another major source of confusion.
I certainly understand that the scope of this issue may be way beyond your responsibilities, however there has been a steady progression within all of these sites to have a unified login, share a similar codebase and share the identical database and it does seem to me that the pruning of superfluous and duplicate forums and the general cleanup of old forums seems a natural progression of this process. Do you realize that there are close to 100 forums with less than 5 replies none of which are more recent than two years ago that exist across SD’s sites. You can’t be arguing that those forums are really necessary. I’m not saying to delete old threads because that’s deleting history but in virtually all cases the containing forum could easily be deleted and the threads simply moved up to the parent forum. That effort alone would go a long way towards making this collection of web sites more understandable.
Again I realize that this is something that is beyond the scope of a simple fix but it’s something for which I’ve been lobbying for quite some time and something that would make life far easier for those of us that wonder where the heck someone is coming from.