Creating a new term in Categories will create a new forum. As will creating a new “node” in Topics or Organizations. WordPress uses “taxonomies” as hierarchical organizing structures, and Categories is built-in, while Organizations is an artifact from the university installation (under Organizations, every department and professor in the university has a blog located at a node in that tree). I haven’t had time to take out the other other, but my plan is the end up with only Topics, which is appropriate for our use. Soooooo, please use Topics for experimentation.

It’s probably going to lead to problems if everyone can freely create new forums, yet I very much want y’all to have the maximum power to make this environment the way you want it. What’s I’m hoping will happen, and I’ve seen you guys do it before, is that you’ll work out rules and procedures for creating and removing forums. No doubt some sort of referendum will be necessary, some way of taking the pulse of the community about the proposed new forum.

A board on alien abductions is likely to be controversial. God knows we’ve fought too many battles over hard-science versus otherwise, and while there may actually be a scientific basis for inquiring into alien abductions, we also know that the subject is surrounded by all sorts of emotion. I’d want the community to have a chance to weigh in, and if there’s general approval, then it’ll be harder for the issue to become controversial later.

But the rest of you guys are falling down on the job. No recipes from you. Which is not unexpected since men may make great chefs but they don’t make every day cooks with a little recipe book.

I create some of my own recipes. I’ll have to post some of those one of these days. But I have to vet the recipes before I post them.

There is an option on my dasboard to create new categories but since my post I wonder if the caqtegories are the same as a different forum.

I just installed IE9, and just the mild twonking they did of the menu structure was annoying as hell. You get used to moves and procedures becoming almost instinctive, and I’m making a lot of mistakes getting used to things being in different positions. Things that really didn’t have to be in different positions.

But like Robert says, it’s a work in progress, so any criticism at this point isn’t really fair. Fielding it on short notice was a remarkable feat, and appreciated.

The biggest missing piece is the thing that you and a lot of other people bumped up against right away. The core software, WordPress, is simple blogging software, designed to run a single blog, and doesn’t have the access-control/security system the environment needs. It presumes one or a handful of authors working behind the scenes to produce a finished blog, where a discussion forum is all about the interaction through writing.

OTOH, I’m planning a flexible access-control system, because I dislike fences, and I want to be able to grant people, this group especially, the maximum power to control and build their own environment (that was the laudable premise behind the failed TikiWiki experiment). You brought up the power to create new “nodes” in the forum tree, and while it could indeed lead to chaos, it could also lead to a lot of creative and interesting experiments.

The way I see it, the core of Zoners who’ve made it this far are easily the group I would trust with broad powers to run the Zone. You all sure as hell know by now everything I know about moderating a forum, some of you more. If you want to set up new boards, you go right ahead.

Besides, the way it works behind the scenes, you can’t really cause any damage doing that sort of thing. If one forum doesn’t work out, we can just assign its posts to another forum. Backing out of a forum won’t be the end of the world.