True, it did have a recently installed beta forum of phpBB, working in pretty good order, but I wasn't exactly prepared for an entire community to come knocking on the door. Nor was I prepared for the six weeks after that - in which me, a bunch of old forum regulars who later became our trusted Moderators and the community itself - recreated the house that was the temple of the community.
Truth be told, I really never anticipated people would stick where they were. I constantly made preparations behind the scenes to make the transition to Google Groups as smooth as possible.
The SCF has gone through many changes in the past year. We took some good decisions and admittedly we took some bad ones also. One of the worst decisions was adding too many different forums. The whole thing just became too complex.
Many people were complaining that there were too many forums. So a few weeks ago - after much debate behind the scenes - we simplified the Board Index and made it look much more like the original forums we started out with back in May 2007.
Some more simplifying changes are planned for the near future, but we like to do those gradually so people won't be dealing with yet another massive overhaul of the forums. Basically the current structure will remain the same, but we may close some of the subforums under the Corner Bar and a number of mostly inactive forums elsewhere.
We also want to turn the focus back to pure SketchUp and may ultimately also close the 3rd party forums such as V-Ray, Artlantis, Podium and Kerkythea, among others. These programs have their own successful forums already and we are not sure if SCF adds anything useful by hosting those forums as well, adding more to the overall complexity of the forums themselves.
We hope that with these 'last' changes people understand we do listen to your complaints very much and that you can enjoy a simple yet effective SCF, with a limited amount of forums.
Jim Foltz, the SCF Ruby forum Moderator and also author of the well-known SketchUp blog SketchUpTips, has introduced a new way of indexing scripts in the Ruby forum. By adding the keyword [Plugin] to the subject line in the post where a script is included, those topics will be found by the forum Search function.
This system will work for any kind of content and we will use it in the future to replace the now static Tutorials Index and possibly also to make the use of subforums obsolete.
We have a number of exciting things lined up for the future. Don't worry, we won't add more forums! :)