I need to overrun some of your statements due to time issues on my part, sorry ._.
Thanks for the replies. In my opinion, I don't see how it's "cluttered" to have separate discussion threads for each chapter. The story's nearly complete, after all, so what would be so bad about having them all separate? Especially for people who find this site years from now? They'll be able to have clean references for each chapter divided nicely.
From our experience, small sections die fast after the series ends that's why we merge the complete section into one big thread a while after we see that the discussions have come to a stop (usually 1-3 months after the series ended). Most people just don't look into single chapters threads anymore after a while.
Unless there was some kind of sequel, those series aren't discussed much anymore and for an occasional discussion, it doesn't need separate threads. I can point you to several former-sections threads which were merged because the section became inactive. And yes, it was just as active as TRC is right now before.
You have to see that MH is a very wide spread community focused on 'active Edited Mangas' and not on fandom. We're not specialized on a certain series but on making manga available, so when a series has ended most members tend to move on very fast to something ongoing and the remaining 'die hard' fans fall silent after a while because the general interest on the series has completely died.
That is simply MH's special field and we work according to that. It differs from usual 'fan forums' and therefor certainly causes the complains you raise. But discussion sections at MH are a support for the Edited Manga work in the first place and when these Edited Mangas have ended, the discussions naturally come to an end as well. I hope I could clarify our reasoning a little?
But here, you're throwing ALL the clothes into one big pile. And now we have to dig through the whole thing to find bits and pieces of what we want.
Well, what do you search in old chapter threads? If you want to discuss some older happening in the manga, you can us the merged thread or a general discussion thread for this without being focused on a chapter number. That's an improvement in my eyes, to be honest. Separate threads are only interesting during the 'hot' phase when a chapter is fresh and gets actively discussed. Older threads vanish onto the forums bottom anyways. It's very rare that someone bumps them up and answering on a months old discussion isn't really effective. Better start a fresh topic.
I don't really see the loss here. In fact, I support doing this for all sections with not-so-big chapter discussion threads equally for the above reasons on why a finished series has generally no long lived future at MH. The mere reason for separate chapter discussion threads lies also in MH's nature: it's bound to support the active Edited Mangas.
Like I said, I think we all would have tried something like that sooner, but I was hoping the mods would come up with the idea first, instead of cowing us with mass deletions and making us afraid to try something like that. But the thread's still there so that's a good sign. We'll see how it goes, okie?
We're not having a fixed TRC mod at the moment. Other moderators take shifts in the sections, so to say. Which means that the current situation is mainly caused because the moderators who look over TRC are not having it as their main section and therefor do not look as deep into the possible improvement for TRC as it could be.
That's why, as you do right now, raising your voice and calling out for the mods is the best you can do. MH itself has grown a lot faster than the mod staff and we're having a hard time at the moment to catch up. TRC is not the only section that has fallen into the shadows a little but it's not on purpose and we're very glad when you point issues out to us.
We'll make sure to let the mods in charge know to inform you on when they delete or merge something. At least a note in the thread why something vanished but that doesn't mean that spam and offtopic gets tolerated. We usually have 'Hangout' threads in the series sections for being a bit more chatty but I just see that TRC is lacking one, hrrm. I'll sticky your Mega-Convo and will post something there as well to let everyone know, okay?
