So -- to be clear, and I really should put this in the "Important things to know about DU4" thread, the list of Retired forums is essentially just all placeholders at the moment.
Over the years, and particularly in the early years, DU was fine with "forum creep" -- basically any time someone requested a new group, we'd just grant it. But over the years this has led to quite a few forums which are essentially dead at this point, along with a number of others which seem redundant. So once DU4 is launched, I plan to do a reassessment of the smaller forums.
Side note: We call the smaller forums "groups" on DU3. On DU4 I just want to call them all forums, but the former groups will still work the exact same way, (They'll have their own Hosts, and Statements of Purpose, etc. -- none of that will change. I'm just going to call them forums instead of groups.)
Anyway, the idea is to retire some of the truly dead forums, and perhaps merge other ones together. For example, do we need a not-so-busy Sports forum, a not-so-busy Football forum, a not-so-busy Baseball forum, a not-so-busy Basketball forum, etc. etc. etc. when we could just have a single much-busier Sports forum? I think perhaps not. So a fair amount of the way I've been thinking about DU4 is to do with streamlining things. That's why there are only six categories for the smaller forums now, instead of the two dozen or so that exist on DU3, for example.
As it happens, if we do end up consolidating forums like this, I do have some future ideas for how to organize topics within those forums -- but I haven't even talked about that with Elad yet (I don't want to give him a heart attack while he's still finishing DU4).
Anyway, long story short -- on DU4 I've dumped a lot of forums into the Retired section which may or may not ultimately end up being retired. I was just trying to "clear the decks" as it were in preparation for deciding what to do next with them.
But to answer the original question -- there are a couple of Main forums that I plan to retire too. The new Latest Videos page makes the Videos & Multimedia forum completely unnecessary, since it provides a one-stop location for all the videos on DU. And I'm not sure if Editorials & Other Articles really serves a useful purpose any more -- it just provides another location to sort of "dilute" subjects which could better be located elsewhere. So yes, I'm currently planning to retired Editorials.
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