Yup, it's a good idea to work on one section at a time.
With the Clubs.. agreed, most of them are long dead and outdated.. However, I don't think the need to ask permission to make new clubs is what is holding people back. There hasn't been a request for a long time. Also, many of the clubs and the discussions live on even though the founder is no longer around (like the Gentlewoman's Society.. and I don't think the British Society has been updated lately either), but I agree that the sheer amount of dead-ish clubs are not very welcoming.
Hmm.. would it work to post an announcement there saying that people can create new clubs or re-start already existing ones? Then we can keep Kit's beautiful and very organised club threads for nostalgia (I think there are too many threads to send to the Archives.
)
But the overall question is whether we really need to lock/archive/delete a lot of threads throughout the forum? True, some boards have like.. 16-20 pages of old threads but since most people only look one or two pages back (well, that's what I do at least!
) perhaps we can just leave the threads as they do no harm?
But I admit I would like to see some kind of order and neatliness to prevail.. I just really don't know how to.. I mean though deleting/archiving everything would give each board a much cleaner look the old threads still belong to each board because they are A-U history!!
But the boards are also very different.. perhaps we should just take it board by board and start a general thread and the people who use the board and has an opinion on it could discuss what action needs to be taken? But I know we tend to discuss everything to Valinor and back.. but this is the only solution I can think of.. since each board is so different...