The Great Atomic Forum Split

It’s a new era for the Atomic forums! More topics! More logic to it all! More more!

The Atomic forum categories have served us well over the years. But it’s fair to say that some categories have been a bit ambiguously named, and also that there are certain topics of conversation that just aren’t represented at all.

We’re fixing all that tomorrow. Your requests and feedback have been heard, and we trust the end result is an Atomic Forum that better reflects what you're all into, and what Atomic is all about.

So, we’ve carefully examined the existing forum structure, left as much intact as possible, and now have:

Added a few new forums

Displays

Overclocking

Motherboards and RAM

Storage and optical

Mobile phones

Laptops

Software

3D (design)

Web design

Photography

Mac

Plus we’re renaming a couple of existing forums to better reflect their focus in the light of the new more precisely focused forums. These two are the big ones that split, and we’re renaming them to best reflect what we think will be the remaining main topics of conversation:

CPUs and cooling (renamed from old ‘CPUs, overclocking and cooling’)

PDAs and music players (renamed from old ‘Portable technology’ forum)

Graphic design (renamed from old ‘Graphics, art and design’)


At an undetermined but very exciting moment tomorrow we’ll switch to the new forum categories.

As you can see, what we’ve mainly done is taken the categories where there was a diverse collection of topics being funneled into one broad zone, and split them into more easily identifiable topics, ones that we expect will be of good interest to atomicans given the volume of discussion in the old main forums. The old CPUs, overclocking and cooling got the most attention, as well as Portable technology and Design.

There’s no change at all to the other forums. Green Room, for example, should not change. It is the mighty melting pot. PC Games and Console games too, we feel, work very well as they are without further division.

PLEASE NOTE that at the moment of launch all forums will be empty, and fresh and ready for you to start posting.

Through the day tomorrow, and next few days, the mods and I will be going through the forum cats that have been split up and moving posts to their more appropriate new home.

This is the only way we can manage this. It’s impossible for us to move any threads before the new forums to go live, as that would effectively be making them disappear completely until the new forums go live, and nobody wants that.

An unfortunate consequence is that you may be posting in a thread at exactly the same time as we’re moving it, that’ll generate an error, and we do apologise for any temporary inconvenience.

Please give us time to move threads, we ask that you do not RTM if you happen to see a thread that better belongs elsewhere.

Note we will not be going all the way back and moving *every* thread ever made – just the most recent ones, that are likely to be active. So, the last few weeks or so, basically. If something ancient gets bumped that belongs in another forum (and it doesn’t get locked), we’ll move it then.

We’ll be watching closely how this all works out over the coming months. If it turns out that we need to fine tune anything, or add even more forums we’ll totally be up for it. But for now, please hold off on suggesting even more forums, or minor revisions of what we have. This is what we’re going with for this particular revolution.

Thanks everyone! Remember:

Form and order are the gateways to free expression.

Change is good.

All these worlds are yours. Use them together. Use them in peace.