Opinions on Taxonomy of Site Articles

History:

When we first set up the site, we looked over the articles we had on the blog, and created categories to suit them. We have tweaked them a little over the years, mainly separating the News out from the Articles and adding Podcasts, Five Second Reviews and Cartoons/Humor.


Now:

I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to streamline at least the menus. It seems to me that most people read the site from the Front Page, or one of the modules that display ALL the recent articles/blogs mashed up together. Some occasionally browse News or Reviews. Having the subcategories (Analysis, Rants and Raves, Gaming Scene, Interviews, etc.) as menu items isn't particularly useful, and just clutters things up, particularly on mobile, which is how more and more people read the site.

Question:

Do any of you browse by subcategory? If so which one? Example: Browsing the Interviews
Do any of you use the Advanced Search by subcategory?


ETA: I'm talking about Article Categories, NOT forum categories. We will get to forum categories sometime in the future.

craniac wrote: I just come to the site and click trash talk, then read the recent posts and the mega threads (what games are you BUYING) etc. once in a while I'll read a front page article. I don't know why some stuff goes into Mos Eisley and other content is in Ameritrash.

Stuff goes into the wrong categories in Trash Talk because when you click on New Topic it defaults to whatever category you are currently reading. If you want to post in category other than what you are currently reading, you have to change the category using the drop down menu at the top of the post submission page. A lot of people overlook that step, so the staff has to go in and move the topic to the correct category. We don't have members here who are category nazis (thank goodness, I hate it on other sites when someone puts the effort into posting something, and the first response they get is from some dickhead telling them they posted in the wrong category), but the downside of that, is we don't have members calling attention to things in the wrong category and we ourselves are kind of lazy moderators, so we only occasionally go in hunting for stuff in the wrong categories and moving them.

Sevej wrote: The only things I've ever used category on is Reviews, Articles and those Barnes' & Matt Thrower Stuff. I think the first deserves its own category, and the laters can be summed into one.

When you say "Barnes' & Matt's Stuff" do you mean that you browse by author? If so how do you do that? Do you use the Columnist menu at the bottom of the site? Or the scroller at the bottom of their articles?