This all happened over a very long time and I don't understand all of the evolution myself — I doubt that anyone recalls every detail. Which forum or forums are still locked? I can fix that.
Locked "Member Supported" forums:
Aeris
Atomic Aquatics
Bare
Liquivision
Zeagle
Locked "Q&A" Forums
Deep 6
But see my point at the end.
In any case, the easiest way to find a manufacturer's name in S
cubaBoard's Forum list is to use your browser's Find feature. That will jump to the name so you don't have to know if it is in Q&A for Scuba Manufacturers or Member Supported Manufacturers.
It doesn't show up if you are browsing on a phone. Have you looked at your visitor stats lately? What percentage of your users are still visiting the site via a desktop or laptop?
Anyway this misses the point that it if you are asking about a specific product, it is confusing to have 2 forums where it is equally valid to ask the question. For example should a question about a Scubapro reg go in the Scubapro forum or the regs forum?
It's even more confusing if you post thinking you are going to get a response from the manufacturer - because that's what the board is telling you: "Q&A for Scuba Manufacturers - A place where SB users can communicate directly with manufacturers of scuba equipment and accessories!" - but all you get is a bunch of squabbling between people with no apparent connection to anything.
I think that we all agree that it would be desirable but the logistics of verifying the current participation of each manufacturer is beyond the capacity of our volunteer group.
Unfortunately, merging them into one forum would be very labor intensive and time consuming. Each forum has to be moved individually and manually assigned a sort-order number. Moving a forum isn't instant. It can take 2-20 minutes each depending on the number of posts because every related database entry is (automatically) modified. You have to wait for the system to complete the move before you can start another.
That suggests the underlying database scheme was poorly designed. I run a phpBB board with a similar number of posts and moving a subforum from one category to another is nearly instantaneous.
And again, that should be besides the point. When I'm managing my site, I always do it with the understanding that whatever I do potentially affects my 70,000 visitors a day (on average). It's worth a few hours of my time if I can meaningfully improve the experience of some of the hundreds of thousands of hours of my members' time each week.
Right now you have a confusing mess, including actually misleading forum categories, and if it were my site it would bother me so much I would just have to fix it. There are of course, multiple ways to address this, but here's what I would do if this were my site.
1. Identify which sites have active reps. This won't take that long since many of the forums in "Q&A" have had no posts in over a year. For the rest, delete them (see #2) or move them to the other category which I would rename to something like "Archived Manufacturer Q&A".
2. Go through the Archived subforums and for those with fewer than a given number of threads, move the threads to the appropriate Diving Gear forum and then delete that subforum. If you set the minimum at 20 threads, this will get rid of almost 2/3rds of the subforums. Even setting it at 10 will be over half.
3. Lock all the Archived subforums. Leave a note under the Archived description that manufacturers can contact you to get their forum moved back to "Q&A". Also explain that current discussions should go under the relevant equipment or travel category.
I'll be happy to help if you do decide to do some sort of clean up of these forums/categories.
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