Agreed.
The subforums that focus on one style in particular are withering.
I recall YEARS AGO there was a Southern Praying Mantis forum here as well, but that one got closed, not due to inactivity, but due to members from different SPM lineages constantly insulting each other (much worse than the WC forum ever got). Even if it hadn't been closed and were still around today, it would be dying, too. There's really only so much that can be discussed about a single style, anyway, even if there are different lineages/substyles.
Merge into the main Kung Fu forum? This forum is really an artifact of our forum's founder, Steve Creel, who was a proponent of Praying Mantis. It's always been a bit of an outlier however, like the SPM subforum. I want to let this stand because years ago this was an issue and several NPM members rallied to have this subforum continued. But they seem to be gone now. Or at the very least, they've stopped posting.
It's true what you all say about individual style forums. The Wing Chun subforum is suffering too. The Shaolin subforum is still doing well, but that's a bit of a different story for many reasons.
On the whole, posts are way down, which in some ways is a relief because flame wars are way down too. View numbers are still solid so people are still reading it and lurking. We still get plenty of eyeballs overall.
I'm not going to move on this until after our tournament because I've got plenty of other tasks to deal with until then, and leaving this here isn't hurting anything, but consolidation is certainly food for thought. It would reduce some of the noise in terms of having less subforums.
Gene Ching
Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
Author of Shaolin Trips
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