One thing I have found in the past is that when you separate one "big bucket" forum into separate more defined forums, you get a big dropoff in participation.

I think this is because users lose the sense of community, and start going to the forums strictly to get quick answers.  Plus it is just too much work to try to stay on top of 5 - 10 forums.

One way to resolve this is to create a forums master view.  This would be a configurable view of the forums where you can toggle on and off the different forums you are viewing.

In this way the users that like to do general browsing can do so with just a bit more control.
(That is by toggling off the stuff they definitely don't care to view.

Aggregation is one of the great hits in the blog world, and I think it can save the community sense for us forum users.

Thanks

Phil

I am very happy to hear that you are looking into this.
makes sense to have it for subscribers.

If an Icon was assigned to a forum, then It could show up next to the posts from that forum kind of like the Smileys for posts.  This would give a nice visual que.

Thanks for all your great work.