pandas making changes, i dont like it either

yeah, what the hell? graphic arts merged with literature.... what? lots of forums gone?

honestly, what did you expect?  as activity decreases, the reason to keep inactive forums around becomes less and less compelling.  lit and graphic arts obviously needed to be combined because both are almost completely dead.  lit literally had two active topics.  come on.  additionally, music creation just makes more sense with its activity level as a subforum of music, but this leaves the arts section with a whopping ONE FORUM, so you might as well move the art/lit forum up to the general section and have one less section around.  then you realize that the FILM forum's first page goes back three months and you think, well there's no reason for that to exist either.  it can easily be combined with music which the amount of activity they both see.

also it's a dumb forum.  like it's almost as bad as the crap shack was.  people just do not know how to effectively use that forum.  i wanted to GET RID OF IT a long time ago once we realized am had inadvertently replaced  it as a decent casual forum but chef said he had ideas for it so we just left it as it was.  that didn't pan out so someone suggested we PURGE it and start over but then people just made the same dumb topics and chef agreed so it's gone.  it's outmoded not only because am draws the only worthwhile topics away from it, but also because gw itself is just one large CASUAL FORUM now.  it's not necessary like it might have been five years ago.

i don't think it makes gw look any more dead than it actually is.  it is just a new setup based on the fact that activity is slipping and it doesn't make sense to keep a bunch of dead forums around.  that, if anything, makes us look dead.  last post: 3 months ago.  that's what i wanna see!!!  at least now all our forums will be reasonably active, so it looks like a small but buzzing community instead of a stereotypical forum with like 15 separate forums that all get very few posts.  plus i like that it's compacted.  i have the game dev section minimized, so i don't even have to scroll to see the bottom forums anymore.

the times they are a-changin

The only hindrance to me is the music+film forums, as I am always interested in movies people bring up, but I am totally out of sync with the music tastes here, and it's pretty impossible to tell whether topics are about music or tv without clicking.

it's not wasting a click, it's chancing a minute or two of reading before you realize a topic is about some animal collective shit or something.