No that's not what I meant at all. Clearly it's not obvious to you that the reduction in staff numbers has a knock on effect, especially when the team is stretched so thin. Maybe it's just me that sees that.
OK, I think maybe we're talking at cross purposes here. A thinly-stretched team is horrible for everyone in it - no argument there - and I really feel for anyone affected by this.
But a reduction in staff numbers is intrinsically a financially-motivated change, and if that makes a forum unmaintainable then I think the link from finance to forum closure is right there.
I (wrongly?) perceived Paul's post to imply it was nothing to do with finances/resources when he said:
For new Frontier games we are slowly moving discussion and feedback over to Discord as fewer and fewer gamers are choosing to use forums and opt instead for sites they already use.
Setting all that aside... Someone else has already pointed out something which doesn't truly jibe: you don't save much money or staff time if you don't shut down the
whole forum site. Having run a site, I would personally break down the support workload into two separate buckets: firstly the effort to maintain the server which runs the forum (can be outsourced, of course) and the forum software on top of the server, which can be
very non-trivial in both person-hours and outgoing cash, and secondly the effort to keep the forum itself spic and span - moderation being a key element of that, with a bit of "administration" thrown in on top. The moderation heavy lifting (handling spam and flame-wars, for example) is often done by volunteers (as seems to be the case here), leaving mainly the forum admin duties for the "staff" (paid or otherwise).
So, getting to the point: if I were to shut down a significant sub-forum on our site, the server maint. and admin loads and costs would probably reduce by at most a few percent (providing zero real motivation to do it); the moderation load would certainly decrease a fair bit but if that only lightens the load for volunteers, there's still no motivation for the company to do it as it doesn't free up significant staff time.
I guess this is why I fear that the FD forums are on a slippery slope to oblivion. I hope I'm wrong.
