Hopefully Mat will get a chance to comment this time.
The Full Ring No-Limit Forum consists of players from 2NL up to 1000NL and above. As you could guess, this creates a lot of problems.
It's a little bit silly IMO that the biggest poker strategy forum on the internet clumps together all stakes in one forum of the most popular poker game. 2NL plays nothing like 1000NL. NLFR has become the new zoo.
Before the naysayers point to traffic in our forum, I would like to point out that many aren't participating because of the current layout. Lots of micro-stakes guys don't want to have their basic/beginnerish questions ridiculed by the higher stakes guys. And the higher stakes guys don't want to post in a forum that predominantly covers games which are well beneath their scope.
Recently, we ran
this poll to see how much of our community supported a split. The results were:
96% of the posters want a split.*
In
another poll, 71% of our community* said that a split would lead to increased participation by them.
Many of us believe that the ideal layout would be 3 forums:
2NL-50NL micro stakes
100NL-200NL small stakes
400NL+ mid to high stakes
Although we know that a total of 3 forums might not be feasible at this time, we are hoping to
at least split into 2 forums on a trial basis to see how it goes. We're not sure where the split should take place, but we mostly agree it should be either at the 100 or 200 level.
I would also like to point out that while I don't have access to specific traffic data, I'm sure that either one of the split forums would be more popular than any of the seven limit forums that exist.
I will let others chime in as to why a split would be good.