Especially with all the crappy "art" threads about, they're gonna cause the problem of before of the long story threads being drowned out again --crono_logical

The oldest thread on the first page of the writing forum is currently from July 7. You can either have story threads "drowned out", or you can leave them on the front page of a dead forum to rot, which is the current situation. They don't get "drowned out" as it stands now, but they STILL get no posts. Obviously keeping them in their own forum doesn't make them work any better. What's the harm in letting them be buried by art threads? At least a few people would see them before they were buried. Who sees them now?

The oldest thread on the first page of the art forum is August 25. At least 6 of those are sig threads, threads about web banners, or threads about digitally "playing" with an official artwork. If you dumped that stuff into the Help Forum, which is where it used to go a long long time ago, and where people still often instinctively create threads about sigs, it'd make even more room for writing / reading threads.

The purpose of splitting writing into its own forum was to attempt to artificially generate traffic for threads people didn't want to post in and were thus buried under threads people did like. The cost is that the few writing/reading threads that WOULD'VE been popular are also killed off along with the rest of the unpopular ones.

Three subforums of a main forum would be just as bad as if not worse than the current situation, in my opinion. You'd just be killing off the art forum too, granting it the same second-class seclusion as the poetry forum. Subforum = bad.

I draw your attention to the Lounge. Many threads in there are unpopular, and are buried very quickly. Look how many threads have 0-2 posts. Yet we don't split off a new forum called "Unpopular music" and attempt to save them. Let the unpopular writing threads be buried under art. Anything is better than the current situation. It's worth potentially burying a few unpopular writing / reading threads to save the ones that could be good enough to discuss. And I still argue that with more people being forced to read writing/reading threads (if they're in a forum together with something more popular, i.e. art), less threads will be buried as a result.

BoB, as I said, this takes no work. Merging three forums takes about a minute. I'd even be in favor of archiving the current forums and creating a new empty forum to get a clean start, instead of throwing all the current dead threads into one huge forum, so it'd be easier to undo if you ever decided to in the future. But we went a long long time with art, writing and poetry all together, and it might not've been ideal, but it DID have plenty of traffic being generated and a whole lot of popular threads with tons of posts.