Regarding Forum Games, at the time when I made these changes, I was fitting the forum to the smaller, "cozier" community S9 had become. There wasn't really much talk about re-expansion, the Mafia games had died, and it didn't seem like there was much interest in that sort of thing. Now that we're switching focus to designing for new users, then, yes, that might be something that needs to come back. The only question there is, do we want it to be a place for Yoyo-style "count to a million" 'games', or is it for actual games that just happen to be play-by-post?
As for Introductions, the reason it no longer exists is basically the same. We weren't really even getting new members at the time of the changes, and the ones that did stay around were few enough that they didn't need a whole welcoming ceremony, they could just jump right in. If we want to do a new Introductions thing, perhaps it can start as a thread, and as membership picks up to the point where that actually does become unwieldy, then we'll consider a whole board. Right now, it's a question of volume and clutter. You're right in pointing out that having too many topics in a board, or too many posts in a topic, creates clutter. But too many boards on the index creates a different type of clutter, and while we can afford more boards at the moment, we might not always be in that position. Having a board for Introductions is nice, I understand, but we'll really have to consider whether something like that is worth the space of an entire board once it comes time that it's actually needed.
And the transition from Introductions Thread to Introductions Board would be a lot easier than some other transitions, because there's only one thread to be concerned with.
As for Gaming discussion, I don't know that it's different enough from General Discussion that we can't just put them both here? That's the sort of area where I think the best strategy would be to wait until the need arises. If we make a new board later on, we wouldn't have to move every topic, only the active ones, and it's not likely to reach ridiculous numbers before we decide the new board is necessary.
Finally, I wasn't definitely saying no to the WIP idea. While generally those sorts of topics don't get shouted down on the GMC unless the game is absolutely horrible (it's mostly technical topics that get the arrogant treatment in my experience), you do bring up some good points about it being silly to have to change boards for that. And I suppose we do have the advantage (for now anyway) of being small enough that WIPs here won't immediately be drowned out by dozens of other WIPs.
The only reason I mention the GMC is because the site as a whole needs to differentiate itself from similar sites to justify its own existence. If the GMC is the same as us with more people, then what reason is there to come here instead of there? Which means we need to compete in "blue oceans," and not waste our energy trying outdo some things the GMC already does perfectly fine. Now, you're right, on the particular issue of a WIP forum, it's probably not as important to be different, because there's good-different and bad-different, and cutting content we could actually support would be bad-different. Having a unique identity is just something I think we should at least talk about in all areas of moving forward. But I digress.
