For many years I did not know this forum existed because I never thought to click on “Arena” on the athas.org website. It seems to me that the forums could more clearly stand out on the website, or even have their own separate URL/Name to make it a more prominent place to visit. It really could use a more intuitive format as well! Something that looks more like Dragonsfoot or Candlekeep Forums.
Forums are far better than Discord for discussion and documentation, it’s a shame to see so many going the way of Discord instead.
This forum CMS is known as a Discourse forum, and I actually like Discourse. As far as the address goes, unfortunately, it’s too late for that because we have so many links to arena.athas.org, both from outside and inside this forum, and changing the address will break those links.
There is definitely something that could be done about the Athas.org front-page to make the forums more prominent.
As @redking says, this is more or less off-the-shelf software; it lives at a separate subdomains because it’s a truly distinct suite of software.
There’s some theming that may be able to be done, but also playing games with color contrasts and the like can really go wrong, to the point where text is unreadable, and so needs to be treated with care.
As far as prominence on the main site … There are maybe some ways that I can flow in some pointers to recent active threads; it’s been a while since I’ve really looked.
Something that it is doing already that is probably too subtle, is that every article and announcement on the site actually embeds an associated thread, if it exists. I can look at making this … more obivous, because it’s really not
I don’t know if this is possible with the forum software, but Canonfire.org (our Greyhawk cousins’ site) has a little forum topic feed on its frontpage. Could this work for the athas.org site too?
I second the notion to edit the webpage (and mobile version) so that Arena has the word FORUM next to it in the menu. It should in theory be a matter of editing the link text slightly, without changing the redirect portion at all.
