Organizing Your Forum: Subforum or main page?

I am just curious as to what you all do when it comes to organizing your forum? How do you choose what forums belong on your main page/index and what go as a subforum.

For me, I have a book forum dedicated to various series....as of right now, 9 different series.
As of now, each Book Series(I.e. Steven Dos Santo's The Torch Keeper) is a category and each book for that series has its own individual forum that is listed on the main index.

My friend likes this because it allows them to discuss each book without having to worry about spoilers.

Another friend says, that if a book has 6 books(i.e. Micahel Grant GONE series) that can make the forum even bigger having a forum for each book and suggested I do just one big forum dedicated to the series and let people discuss the books in the forum...but one big forum full of threads, leads to people accidentally spoiling/reading spoilers and it doesn't seem that organized to me.

Then Another friend, said I should just utilize subforums and have a Main forum for each series but each sub-forums is whatever book is in that series.

But i always hate subforums because i feel like it is annoying have to keep clicking to get to a forum instead of just being able to directly go somewhere. Plus, when a forum is a subforum, it's recent posts can get overshadowed by other forums.

As of right now, i haven't decided yet but i was just curious how do you more experienced admins go about deciding what is a subforum and what is on the main index.

 

I'm not a fan of sub forums either Micah, for the same reason as you.

Deciding on the "tree" for your site is always a tough decision, but remember that you can always move topics and threads later. I like to start with a minimum of topics because this makes the forum appear to have more traffic. As business picks up, you can add more topic areas, and perhaps split things into different series or authors. This lets your members guide the setup of the site based on how they post, and what makes the most sense to them.

 

The only time I utilize a subforum is when the main forum may become crowded. That is why most forums will have subforums to keep things organized. It is all about organization and that is the main reason why most use subforums.

 

I'm a fan of sub-forums and I use them on my community. It keeps the scrolling to a minimum and users can easily find the forums they're looking for.

 

Exactly what @cpvr said. If you don't like sub-forums, you can ''style'' it to make it look better.
I did this and it's look great! Search for xenforo subforums and you'll find something.
If you didn't find it yet, reply to this post and I'll give you some links

 

haha i don't use xenforo anymore IPB<3

 

Oops my fault haha, but I'm pretty sure theres something too for ipb