It's been about a week and I've talked to a number of people interested in chainBB as a forum solution. There's been some great feedback on the good and the bad, and I'm happy to see a few dedicated users. 

The underlying feedback I've gotten from almost everyone points to one thing - it needs to be simpler to start with. There's just too much going on, too many forums, and too much to browse. The lesson I'm taking from here is: just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should right away. 

So to refocus and work on building a community of forum users, I've removed about 80% of the forums that existed. Counterintuitive - but makes sense once you stop and think about it.

This initial beta phase will now focus on the smaller topics, starting with:

- steem related projects (chainbb, esteem, etc)
- steem support forums (help new users out)
- steem news and politics (official announcements + witness discussions)
- forums requested by users

The target audience isn't the general populace, it's those who want to really get into steem whether at a technical, economic, political, in the community, or some other level. 

I'll also plan to keep any forums that users request as long as they're actually used. If you want to breathe life into a community on a forum, I'd like to help.  I'll put a request thread in the chainBB forums once I've got a process in place if you're interested in your own forum. Otherwise feel free to just message me. 

It's been an interesting shift in perspective using steem as a forum... I wrote this post not as a blogger, but I wrote it as someone writing some notes to a community that's forming, in our dedicated area. I may also start downvoting off-topic comments and posts that use the wrong tags, and then make the forums automatically minimize those posts.