What catagories should I put on the forums for my website?

[jcovercash]

Im working on a website to display the progress of my mame cabinet, and hopefully provide info to others who plan on doing this.

Im going to install phpbb for the forums, but I cant figure out what catagories to include and what subcatagories there should be either.
Right now im looking at.

General Mame Discussion [Main Cat.]
---Mame for Windows (Windows Based Mame Applications) [Sub Cat.]
---Mame for Dos (Dos Based Mame Applications) [Sub Cat.]
---Mame for Linux (Linux Based Mame Applications) [Sub Cat.]
---Mame for Mac (Mac Based Mame Applications) [Sub Cat.]

Controls / User Interface [Main Cat.]
---What sub catagories?

Cabinet Building / Refinishing [Main Cat.]
---Building your own cabinet from sratch (Disscusion and Help for those would be cabinet builders) [Sub Cat.]
---Restoring / Refinishing an old cabinet (Disscusion for those fixing up those Old Cabinets) [Sub Cat.]

Show Room [Main Cat.]
---Show off your Complete/ Partial Mame Cabinet Projects.



What am I forgetting? What should I add / remove?

Thanks for all your help.

Josh

 

[notfred]

1) General Discussion
2) MAME Discussion

Peopel break down forums into too many tiny categories, and consequently, questions that would have been seen are ignored. Imagine you have a Cabinet Building forum, and a cabinet restoring forum. let's pretend that someone has estored several cabinets, and is pretty good at it. Now he's trying to build one from scratch, and goes to look for help. He goes into the "building forum". He never looks in the "restoration" forum, and therefore never sees any of the questions posted in there. Had the two categories been combined, he would have seen the restoration questions, and maybe offered an answer while he was looking for the answer to his building question. This happens ALL the time. Especially places like AT, where there are like 347 categories. No one reads ALL the tech forums, and alot of people never see problems that they could help with. if I was setting up the forums at at, there'd be:
Off Topic
Tech Support
video Games (pc and console)
Hot Deals
For Sale/For Trade
Distributed computing

Any more divisions than that, and you just keep people from seeing threads.

 

[jcovercash]

So I could do like a main catagorie called General Disscusion and put as its little blurb under it.
"Cabinet Restoring and Refinishing, Control Building. etc...."

Right?

Thats what your saying?

Only have 2-3 main catagories with no sub catagories?