I recommend to have a category for news and new members, site feedback and other important information. A category for general chit chat and a category for your staff - with a general staf forum, an admin forum and an archive.

What do you think?

most common i see is:

Cat for Staff
Cat for Announcements+Feedback
Cat for general
Cat for topic specific

works well with nearly everything :D

What do you think? In addition to my on-topic forums, I have the following:
The Break Room—Off-topic/banter section
Contact the Staff—Like "Confidential" here, only thread starter and staff can see thread. Also holds "problem"posts.
Staff Room—Just what you'd expect it to be
Executive Washroom—Admin/Senior Staff only. I wouldn't bother with this if there were less than 3 people in the group. But it can be handy to have.I am not a big fan of "I'm new/welcome" forums--especially when they're the first forum.

I also am not a big fan of "Forum News" forums. I have modified forumhome to give me a place to make such announcements.

I am ambivalent about RSS newsfeeds. If I were to do one again, I would not dump them all into a public "News" forum. Instead, I would create a private forum, where the newfeed can dump them, then have a human editor go through them and move the good ones to an appropriate forum where they would stimulate conversation. This editor would also dump the irrelevant ones.

--don

Agreeing in general with the above. The forums I have set up have basically:

Main / General
Site Specific
Admin
Private (for those who have been around long enough/posted enough)

Introductions on one of the forums I moderate fall under the Private area rather than General, because the users post things like addresses and phone numbers.

I think that you should start with basic categories:

Main, General, Site (for the actual topic of your site), and Staff. Than add as little forums as possible. Some people are discouraged by a lot of forums.

A forum for news, news discussion (I prefer not cluttering a news thread with other comments and information), a site feedback section, general chat, and then up to five other forums for site-specific content.

Is it fair to say that less is more when starting a new forum?

We have about 70 members on a private forum that we are moving to a new vBulletin site. This should increase to 120 within a couple of months.

I am currently planning to have just one discussion board and supporting that with:
A Blog - where only selected contributors can create threads (others can contribute to the threads but not start any threads)
A news board - For displaying articles relevant to the club (it's a sports team board)
A past players profile - This will be be a sub-board set-up similar to the Blog.

There will also be a private admin board for the mods etc.

Do a lot of sites start up with too many specific boards?

I see a lot of sites start with 15 or 20 boards and sub-boards and it just gives the impression that they are too quiet.

My approach to new forums now is to be as general as possible with the categories and then slowly split them up when they get more and more active. nothing worse than having a forum deserted because it seems no-one cares about it, when they are posting in another forum that is just slightly differently named :P

Depending on what the site topic is, its usually common to have a section for the following:


Forum Support
General On-Topic Discussion
General Off-Topic Discussion
On Topic News
And a Spam forum for your over-doing-post-a-lot days!

One thing I notice with new boards is a lot of extra forums that are completely dead, try not to make too many boards because it makes your forum look less active.

I am not a big fan of "I'm new/welcome" forums--especially when they're the first forum.

--don

on a forum where members are aware that they will be visiting and posting for a longer period of time then having intros in the first forum is fine....but if, like at a free forum, where a lot of newbies come and go, then having intros/welcome at the top can distract from the forums below.

i like how they are nearer the bottom part of the forums here on vbfans.

great tips swordude and disjunto, they rang a chord with me, thank you thank you,

One thing I notice with new boards is a lot of extra forums that are completely dead, try not to make too many boards because it makes your forum look less active.
Yeah, I noticed that too 'back in the day'!

We started out with 10 forums total, and then after a month or so, I sat down and started to divide threads into new forums and did that until, 3 years later, we have shy of 200 forums total!

It's a lot more work, but, if it helps bring in the people (and more importantly, keep them), you can't put a price on the work!

We've always had this setup though, simply because I hate forums that have 'site news' in their 'random chat' forums:


SITE STUFF and INTRODUCTIONS - category
--- Site News and Views
--- Touch Base
--- Bugs / Problems / Something Broken (only viewable to admins and the thread starter)
--- Site Sponsors / Advertisers
--- The Staff Room (obviously, only viewable to staff)


Seems to work best of other methods I've tried